The Mortdecai Trilogy (56 page)

We looked at each other blankly. The telephone rang.

‘It’s for you, Charlie. Johanna.’

‘Charlie,’ she said in honeyed tones, ‘you may care to know that my bridge-party tonight is off. Yes, off. Lady Pickersgill has telephoned to say that she has a bad cold. So has Lady Cortances. So has Mrs ffrench-Partridge. I hope you are proud of yourself.’

‘Gosh, Johanna, I can’t tell you how sorry …’

‘I have just telephoned the airport; they tell me that there are no planes leaving for London tonight. Moreover, the cleaning lady has just told me that she can no longer oblige: she must devote herself in future to caring for her old mother. Whose funeral she attended last year. Moreover, there is a television van parked in the road outside. Moreover, have you seen the evening paper?’ Without waiting for a Yes, No, or Don’t Know, she hung up.

I went out in the rain to the gate and collected the newspaper. (Your free-born Jersey tradesman will do much for you but he scorns the act of putting newspapers into letterboxes, isn’t that odd?)

We studied the front page. The
Jersey Evening Post
had been fair, nay, kindly to us in the report of the trial but the photograph taken of us on the pavement outside the Court was unfortunate to say the least. We three shambling offenders huddled guiltily together, surrounded by venal shysters, mopping and mowing. George was glaring at the camera in a way that could only be called homicidal; Sam looked like an expletive deleted from a Watergate tape while I had been caught scratching my behind and sniggering over my shoulder. All most unfortunate.

We looked at each other; or to be exact, they looked at me while I shiftily avoided their eyes.

‘I know,’ I said brightly, ‘let’s all get drunk!’

They stopped looking at me and looked at each other. Sonia reappeared, looked at the photograph and promptly got a fit of the giggles. This can be quite becoming in some women but Sonia has never learned the art: her version is too noisy and she tends to fall about on sofas and things, displaying her knickers. Where applicable. George made his displeasure clear to her and she went
back to the real love of her life – her washing-up machine; nasty, noisy thing.

Sam and George started to re-enact the ‘let’s all look at Charlie in a hateful way’ scene, so I rose. I can be hurt, you know.

‘I am going home to watch the television,’ I said stiffly.

‘Oh no you’re not,’ snapped George. ‘You’re going home to change into dark clothes, soft shoes and a weapon, and you’re reporting back here in fifteen minutes with Jock, similarly clad.’

Now, I may choose to make myself seem a bit of a craven at times, when it suits my book, but I don’t take crap like that – even from retired brigadiers.
Especially
from retired brigadiers. I turned to him and gave him a slow, insubordinate stare.

‘It will take
twenty
minutes at least,’ I said insubordinately, ‘because, things at home being what they are, I shall have to look out the clothes myself.’

‘Do your best,’ said George, not unkindly.

In the event, I was back there in twenty-eight minutes.

‘Right,’ said George. ‘Here’s the plan. Since these idiots will not let us lie up
in
their houses we shall have to patrol
outside
their houses – from now until midnight. I shall move between Hautes Croix and this house; Jock will drop Sam at La Sergenté from where he will make his way to St Magloire’s Manor and so, past Canberra House, back here; Jock himself, since both Sonia and Johanna are alone and unguarded, will work between Wutherings and Les Cherche-fuites; you, Charlie, will cover the lanes between here and Belle Etoile Bay. None of us will use metalled roads. Any questions?’

There weren’t any questions.

There the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure,
Drew bitter and perilous breath;
There torments laid hold on the treasure
Of limbs too delicious for death;
When thy gardens were lit with live torches;
When the world was a steed for thy rein;
When the nations lay prone in thy porches,
Our Lady of Pain.

 

Dolores

 

A cold coming I had of it, I don’t mind telling you, just the worst time of the year for a vigilante patrol. I believe I’ve already given you my views about the month of May in the British Isles. This May night, as I picked my glum way down to Belle Etoile Bay, was cold and black as a schoolgirl’s heart and the moon – in its last quarter and now quite devoid of the spirit of public service – reminded me only of a Maria Teresa silver dollar which I had once seen clenched between the buttocks of a Somali lady who was, I fancy, no better than she should be. But enough of that.

Down I stole to Belle Etoile Bay. The sea breathed hoarsely, like a rapist out of training. Back I stole, breathing like a middle-aged vigilante who has neither pocket-flask nor sandwich-case about him because his wife isn’t speaking to him. As I entered Chestnut Lane (
La Rue des Châtaigniers
), nearing the end of my beat for the first time round, a
châtaignier
or chestnut tree quietly divided itself into
two
châtagniers
or chestnut trees and one of the component parts drifted in my direction. I am often asked what to do when things of this kind happen to you and I always divided my advice into several alternative parts; viz, either

a. blubber, or

b. run, or

c. drop on to your marrow-bones and beg for mercy.

If, of course, you belonged, as I did, to an absurd Special Something Unit in the war – yes, that 1939–45 one – then you can do better. What I did was to drop silently to the ground and roll over several times. This accomplished, I plucked out my pistol and waited. The tree-person froze. After a long time he spoke.

‘I can’t see your face,’ he said, ‘but I can see your great arse. I’m putting a Lüger bullet into it in about three seconds flat unless you gimme a good reason why not.’

I stood up, coaxing my lungs back into service.

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘I am recommending you for the Woodcraft Medal. Your impersonation of a tree was most plausible.’

‘ ’Ullo, Mr Charlie.’

‘What do you have on your person, apart from that machine-pistol which I have repeatedly told you not to carry?’

‘Got a flat half-bottle of brown rum.’

‘Faugh,’ I said. ‘I’m not as thirsty as that. When you are next at the Wutherings end of your beat, be so good as to find and fill my pocket-flask; I shall patrol back to Belle Etoile Bay and meet you here again in, say, thirty minutes.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie. I dare say you’d like the sandwich-case, too?’

‘Very well, Jock, since you insist. I suppose I should keep my strength up.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie.’ He started to melt away.

‘Jock!’

‘Yeah?’

‘There should be a few scraps of cold pheasant in the fridge.’

‘They’re still there; I don’t like pheasant, do I?’

‘They will do for the sandwiches, but at all costs remember: pheasant sandwiches are made with brown bread.’

‘Yeah.’

He went on melting away, as I did.

Melting away from Chestnut Lane to Belle Etoile Bay involves getting lost, muddy and wet; not to mention breaking your shins against nameless bits of farm machinery left around
on purpose
by Jerseymen. When I got to the Bay the sea was making the same sort of hoarse, defeated noise: ‘Oh gaw-blimey,’ it seemed to be moaning, “ ’ow much longer ’ave I gotter go on wiv this meaningless to-ing and fro-ing?’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I assured it.

I turned back towards Chestnut Lane: unlike the sea, I could look forward to pocket-flasks and sandwich-cases. That was my error: the gods keep a sharp and jealous eye on chaps who hug themselves in such expectations.

Bursting cheerfully through a hedgerow, I saw a large and tree-like shape in front of me. I thought it was Jock.

‘Jock?’ I said.

The shape took a tree-like pace towards me and hit me very hard on the temple. I fell, more slowly than you could imagine, to the ground, my face smacking the mud as gratefully as though it were a pillow. I was incapable of movement but not really unconscious. A small flashlight was turned on to me; I shut my tortured eyes against it but not before I had noticed a shoe close to my face. It was a
good
shoe, the sort of heavy, tan walking-shoe that I might have bought from Ducker’s of Oxford in the days when my father paid my bills.

The light went out. I felt a hand feeling my temple in a knowledgeable sort of way; it hurt damnably but there was no crepitation – I dared to hope that I might live. Then two strong hands lifted me to a kneeling position and I opened my eyes. Towering above me was a horrendous creature with a face such as hell itself would have rejected. It was near enough for me to receive its stench, which was abominable. Then its knee came up and struck the point of my jaw with a deafening, blinding smash.

Dimly-experienced things happened to me in my stupor; I was rummaged and buffeted, hoisted and wrenched. Wisely, I decided to remain asleep, and sleep I did until an excruciating pain screamed out of my right ear. I jerked wildly from the pain, which redoubled it, so I fainted, only to awake instantly with an even sharper agony. A great explosion happened close to the ear – and more pain. Awake now, in a sort of way, I mustered enough sense to remain motionless while my frightful assailant rustled away. When I was sure that
he had gone I delicately explored my situation. I found that I was standing against a tree. My hands and feet were unencumbered. I tried moving my head – and screamed. Infinitely gently I raised my hands to my ear, asking them to tell my scrambled brain what it was all about. When my hands told me, I fainted again – just as you would have – and awoke instantly with another scream of pain.

My ear, you see, had been nailed to the tree.

I stood very still for what seemed an hour. Then I reached behind me and drew out the Banker’s Special pistol from my hip-pocket. I filled my lungs and opened my mouth to shout for help but a sharp agony came from my jawbone and a horrid grating noise and my tongue discovered that my teeth were all in the wrong places.

I pointed the pistol into the air and squeezed the trigger but I had not the strength to work the double-action. Using both hands I contrived to cock the hammer, then I fired. Then again. Then, with immense difficulty, once more. Jock had often acted as loader for me in the shooting field and he would recognize the three-shots distress-signal.

I waited for an eternity. I dared not spend any more cartridges on signals: I needed them in case the madman came back. I spent the time trying to keep awake – each time I started to fade out my weight came on the ear with excruciating effect – and in trying to remember whether it was Lobengula or Cetewayo who used to nail minor offenders to trees. They had to tear
themselves
loose, you see, before the hyenas got them.

At last I heard a bellow from Jock, the most welcome bellow of my life. I croaked an answer. The bellow came nearer. When Jock finally loomed up before me I levelled the pistol at his belly. An hour before, I would have trusted him with my life but tonight the world was insane. All I could think of was that I was not going to be hurt any more. He stepped closer. I sniffed hungrily. There was no trace of the loathly stench of the witch.

‘You all right, Mr Charlie?’ he asked.

‘Eye aws ogen,’ I explained.

‘Eh?’

‘Aw ogen,’ I explained crossly, pointing to my chin.

‘Jaw broken. Lumme, so it is.’

‘Ailed oo ee,’ I added, pointing to my ear.

He struck a match and hissed with distress when he saw the plight I was in. The nail, it seems, had been driven in to its very head; my ear had puffed up around it and was full of blood.

‘I don’t reckon I could get a claw-hammer under it, Mr Charlie. Think I’ll have to cut it.’

I didn’t want to know what he was going to do: I just wanted him to do it, so that I could lie down and get to sleep. I made vigorous motions towards the ear and shut my eyes hard.

I couldn’t grit my teeth while he cut a channel from the head of the nail to the edge of my ear, because my teeth wouldn’t meet but I remember weeping copiously. He asked me to move my head. No good: the bit of gristle under the head of the nail held fast. There was a long pause then, to my horror, I felt the point of his knife against the corner of my eye. I wrenched away convulsively and screamed as the ear came free.

‘Sorry, Mr Charlie,’ he said as he gathered me up from the kindly mud.

The next time I woke up, Jock was dragging me out of the car and into the Emergency part of the General Hospital in St Helier. He propped me up against the counter, where a kindly but stern lady was making tut-tutting noises at me. She handed Jock a form to fill in: I snatched it and scrawled ‘
SEE IF JOHANNA OK
’. Jock nodded, lowered me to the floor and vanished.

The time after that, I awoke under a fierce white light and a compassionate black face. The latter seemed to belong to a Pakistani doctor who was doing fine embroidery on my ear. He beamed at me.

‘Werry nasty accident,’ he assured me. ‘You may thank lucky stars you are in land of living.’

I started to open my mouth to say something witty about Peter Sellers but found that I couldn’t. Open my mouth, I mean. It was all sort of wired up and my tongue seemed to be trapped in a barbed-wire entanglement.

‘Please to keep quite still,’ said the nice doctor, ‘and you will be as new in twinkling of eye. If not, all my good work is gone for Burton.’

I kept still.

‘Nurse,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘patient is now on surface.’

The stern lady from Casualty Reception appeared, waving forms.

‘Just name, address and next of kin will do for now,’ she said, not too sternly. I lifted a pen weighing a hundredweight and wrote. She went away. A moment later she was back, whispering to the doctor.

‘Mr Mortdecai,’ he said to me, ‘it seems we have just admitted a lady of the same name: is she with you? Mrs Johanna Mortdecai?’

I started to get up; they held me down. I fought them. Someone put a needle in my arm and told me gently that the doctor seeing to Johanna would come to see me presently. Unwillingly, I passed out.

When next I awoke I was in a warm, tight bed and a warm, scratchy nightshirt which was soaked with sweat. I felt like hell and a thousand hangovers: death seemed infinitely desirable. Then I remembered Johanna and started to get up but a little, thin nurse held me down without effort, as though she were smoothing a sheet. A new face appeared, a large, pale chap.

‘Mr Mortdecai?’ he said. ‘Good morning. I’m the doctor who has been attending to your wife. She’s going to be all right but she’s rather badly torn and has lost a good deal of blood.’

I made frantic writing gestures and he handed me a pen and a pad.

‘Raped?’ I wrote.

‘To tell the truth, we don’t know. There seems to be no damage down there, although there are extensive injuries elsewhere. We can’t ask her about the other thing because she is in deep shock: I’m afraid he hurt her rather badly.’

I took up the pen again.

‘Is her ear badly disfigured?’ I wrote.

He looked at the words for a long time, as though he couldn’t understand them. Slowly he met my eyes, with a look so compassionate that I was frightened.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Mortdecai, I thought you knew. Her injuries are not the same as yours at all.’