The Mortdecai Trilogy (4 page)

‘Well, I sort of told him to, really.’

I sat down after all.

Jock’s craggy form disengaged itself smoothly from the shadows just outside the door and came to rest behind my chair. He was breathing through his nose for once, making a plaintive, whistling noise on the exhaust stroke.

‘Did you ring, Sir?’

Jock really is marvellous. I mean, imagine saying that. What tact, what
savoir faire
, what a boost for the young master in time of stress. I felt so much better.

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘have you a pair of brass knuckles about you? I may ask you to hit Mr Martland in a moment or two.’

Jock didn’t actually answer, he knows a rhetorical question when he hears one. But I sensed him pat his hip pocket – ‘me bin’ he calls it – where six ounces of cunningly fashioned brass have lived a snug and smelly life since he was the youngest juvenile delinquent in Hoxton.

Martland was shaking his head vigorously, impatiently. ‘No need for that at all, none at all. Try and understand, Charlie.’

‘Try and make me understand,’ I said. Grim, sore-arsed.

He heaved what I took to be a sigh. ‘
Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner
,’ he said.

‘I say, that’s neat!’

‘Look, Charlie, I was up half the night with that bloodthirsty little old maniac at the Home Office, telling him about our chat yesterday.’

‘Chat’ was good.

‘When I told him how much you knew about this file,’ Martland went on, ‘nothing would do but he must have you done permanently. “Terminated with extreme prejudice” was how he put it, silly little sod. Been reading too many thrillers in between the cups of tea.’

‘No,’ I said kindly, ‘that one hasn’t got into the thrillers yet, except the
Sunday Times
. That’s CIA jargon. He’s probably been reading the Green Berets file.’

‘Be that as it may,’ he went on, ‘be that as it may’ – he obviously fancied that snappy little phrase – ‘be that as it may, I tried to make him see that as yet we really didn’t know what you knew nor where you got it, which was more important; and that it would be madness to liquidate you at this stage. Er, or at any stage of course, but I couldn’t say that, could I? Well, I tried to get him to refer it to the Minister but he said the Minister would be drunk by then and he himself wasn’t permanent enough to disturb him with impunity at that time of night and anyway … anyway I had to come into line and so this morning I thought the best thing was to put Maurice on the assignment, being an impulsive boy, and so give you a fair chance of survival, you see. And Charlie, I’m really so glad that he got the wrong chap.’

‘Yes,’ I said. But I wondered how he had known that I would be at Mr Spinoza’s that morning.

‘How did you know that I would be at Mr Spinoza’s this morning?’ I asked, casually.

‘Maurice followed you, Charlie.’ Wide-eyed, offhand.

‘Bloody liar,’ I thought.

‘I see,’ I said.

I excused myself on the pretext of slipping into something more comfortable, as the tarts say. Something more comfortable was a wonderfully vulgar blue velvet smoking jacket into which Mrs Spon had once sewn, with her own hands, a lot of cunningly designed
webbing which supported a rather shaky old gold-plated riverboat gambler’s revolver, calibre something like .28. I had only eleven of the ancient pinfire cartridges for it and had grave doubts of their usefulness, not to speak of their safety. But this wasn’t for killing anyone, it was for making me feel young and tough and capable. People who have pistols for killing people keep them in boxes or drawers; wearing them is only for making you ride tall in the saddle. I used some mouthwash, renewed the Vaseline on my blisters and cantered back into the drawing room, tall as can be in my high-cantled saddle.

I paused behind Martland’s chair and reflected on how much I disliked the back of his head. It wasn’t that there were rolls of Teuton fat sprouting hog bristles or anything like that; just a neat and hateful smugness, an unjustified but invincible cockiness. Like a female journalist, really. I decided that I could afford the luxury of losing my temper: it would fit into the picture I wanted to create. I took out the little pistol and ground the muzzle into his right ear hole. He sat very still indeed – nothing really wrong with his nerves – and spoke plaintively.

‘For Christ’s sake be careful with that thing, Charlie, those pinfire cartridges are highly unstable.’

I ground some more; it was making my blisters feel better. It was just like him to have been looking at my firearm permit.

‘Jock,’ I said crisply, ‘we are going to defenestrate Mr Martland.’

Jock’s eyes lit up.

‘I’ll get a razor blade, Mr Charlie.’

‘No no, Jock, wrong word. I mean we’re going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we’ll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love.’

‘I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife.’

‘I never think of policeman’s wives, their beauty maddens me like wine. Anyway, the sodomy bit will make your Minister slap a D-Notice on the whole thing, which is good for both of us.’

Jock was already leading him from the room by means of the ‘Quiet Come-Along’ which painfully involves the victim’s little finger. Jock had learned that one from a mental nurse. Capable lads, those.

Jock’s bedroom, as ever, was bursting with what passes for fresh air in W.I, the stuff was streaming in from the wide-open window. (Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand.)

‘Show Mr Martland the spiky railings in the area, Jock,’ I said nastily. (You’ve no idea how nasty my voice can be when I try. I was an adjutant once, in your actual Guards.) Jock held him out so that he could see the railings then started to undress him. He just stood there, unresisting, a shaky smile trembling at one corner of his mouth, until Jock began to unbuckle his belt. Then he started to talk, rapidly.

The burden of his song was that if I could only be dissuaded from my course he would arrange for me to receive

(i) the untold riches of the Orient

(ii) his undying respect and esteem and

(iii) legal immunity for me and mine, yea, even unto the third and fourth generations. At this point I cocked an ear. (How I wish I could really move my ears, don’t you? The Bursar of my College could.)

‘You interest me strangely,’ I said. ‘Put him down a moment, Jock, for he is going to Tell All.’

We didn’t lay another finger on him, he went on and on of his own accord. You don’t have to be a coward to dislike dropping thirty feet on to spiky railings, especially in the nude. I’m sure that in his place I’d have blubbered.

The story so far turned out to be as follows, to wit: Hockbottle Gloag, with an extraordinary lack of finesse, had put the bite directly onto the ear of his old College Chum – the other part of the ‘consenting males’ sketch – sending him a 35-mm contact print of the naughty photograph. (This was by no means part of the agreed plan and was very vexing. I suppose he needed spending money, poor chap; I wish he’d asked me.) The now very august chum, living in dread of his wife’s Sister and other Relations, had decided to cough up the reasonable sum involved but had also asked an Assistant Commissioner of Police to dinner and had put out dainty feelers over the port, such as, ‘What do you fellows do about blackmailers nowadays, eh, Freddy?’ and so forth. The Assistant Commissioner, who had seen certain unpublished material about the Chum in a newspaper editor’s safe, shied like
a startled stallion. Decided that it wasn’t anything he could afford to know about and – perhaps spitefully – gave Chum the name and number of old Martland. ‘Just in case anyone you know ever gets pestered, Sir, ha ha.’

Chummy then asks Martland to dinner and gives him all the news that’s fit to print. Martland says, ‘Leave it to us, Sir, we’re used to dealing with dastards of that kidney,’ and swings into action.

Next day, some sort of equerry, snorting genteelly into his Squadron-Leading moustaches, calls on Hockbottle and hands him over an attaché case full of great coarse ten-pound notes. Five minutes later, Martland and his gauleiters canter in and whisk poor Hockbottle off to the Cottage Hospital of evil fame. He gets a touch of the car battery just to soften him up and comes out of his faint with the regulation glass of Scotch under his nose. But he is made of sterner stuff than me: your actual boofter often is.

‘Faugh,’ he says, or it might have been ‘Pooh!’ petulantly; ‘take the nasty stuff away. Have you no Chartreuse? And you needn’t think you’re frightening me: I
adore
being roughed up by great big hairy dears like you.’ He proves it, shows them. They are revolted.

Now Martland’s brief is only to put the fear of God into Hockbottle and to make it clear that this photograph nuisance must now cease. He has been specifically ordered not to pry and has been told nothing embarrassing, but by nature and long habit he is nosy and has, moreover, a quite unwholesome horror of pooves. He decides to get to the bottom of the mystery (an unfortunate expression perhaps) and to make Hockbottle Tell All.

‘Very well,’ he says grimly, ‘this one will really hurt you.’

‘Promises, promises,’ simpers Hockbottle.

So now they give him a treatment which hurts you at the base of the septum and this is one which even Hockbottle is unlikely to relish. When he regains consciousness this time, he is very angry and also scared of losing his good looks, and he tells Martland that he has some very powerful insurance c/o the Hon. Charlie Mortdecai and they’d better look out, so there. He then shuts up firmly and Martland, now enraged, gives him yet another treatment, hitherto reserved solely for Chinese double agents.
Hockbottle, to everyone’s dismay, drops dead. Dicky ticker, d’you see.

Well, worse things happen in war, as they say, and no one ever really liked Hockbottle of course, except perhaps a few Guardsmen from Chelsea Barracks, but Martland is not a man who appreciates uncovenanted mercies. The whole thing strikes him as thoroughly unsatisfactory, especially since he still has not found out what it is all about.

Judge of his chagrin then, when Chum telephones in a serious tizzy and asks him to call round immediately, bringing the wretched Hockers with him. Martland says yes, certainly, he’ll be there in a few minutes but it’s a little er difficult to bring Mr er Gloag just at present. When he arrives he is shown, distraughtly, a most distressing letter. Even Martland, whose taste has a few little blemishes in it, boggles at the paper it is written on: imitation parchment with edges both deckled and gilt, richly embossed bogus coat of arms at the top and a polychrome view of a desert sunset at the foot of the page. The address, inscribed in Olde Englysshe lettering, is ‘
Rancho de los Siete Dolores de la Virgen
,’ New Mexico. In short, it is from my very good customer Milton Krampf.

The letter says – mind you, I never saw it, so I’m paraphrasing Martland’s account – that Mr Krampf admires the eminent Chum very much and wants to start a fan club (!) to distribute little known biographical material about said Chum to Senators, Congressmen, British MP’s and
Paris Match
. (Terrifying, that last bit, you will admit.) He further says that a Mr Hogwattle Gloat has been in touch with him and is prepared to kick in with some illustrated reminiscences of ‘your mutual schooldays in Cambridge’. He also says how about the three of them meeting someplace and seeing if they can’t work out something to their mutual advantages. In other words, it is the bite. Coy and clumsy perhaps, but unmistakably the bite. (That made, so far, two members of the cast who’d gone off their chumps, leaving only me sane and responsible. I think.)

Martland paused in his narrative and I did not urge him on, for this was very bad news, for when millionaires go mad poorer people get hurt. I was so disturbed that I unthinkingly gave Martland a drink. A bad mistake that, I needed him to stay on edge. As he filled with the old familiar juice you could see his confidence returning, his head reassuming the habitual, maddeningly pompous poise.
How he must have been loathed by his brother officers as they watched him bully and arsehole-creep his way up the service. But one had to remember, all the time, that he was dangerous and far cleverer than he looked or talked.

‘Martland,’ I said after a time, ‘did you say that your hirelings followed me to Spinoza’s this morning?’

‘That’s right.’ Crisply, much too crisply. He was definitely feeling his oats again.

‘Jock, Mr Martland is telling me
fibs
. Smack him, please.’

Jock drifted out of the shadows, gently relieved Martland of his glass and bent down to stare benignly into his face. Martland stared back, wide-eyed, his mouth opening a little. A mistake that, the open mouth. Jock’s great hand swung round in a half circle and struck Martland’s cheek with a loud report.

Martland sailed over the arm of the sofa and fetched up against the wainscot. He sat there a while; his little eyes dripping tears of hatred and funk. His mouth, closed now, writhed – he was counting his teeth, I expect.

‘I think that perhaps that was silly of me,’ I said. ‘I mean, killing you is safe enough, it sort of ties things up for good, doesn’t it, but just hurting you will only make you vengeful.’ I let him think about that for a time, to get the nasty implications. He thought about it. He got them.

At last he cranked a sickly smirk on to his face – beastly sight, that – and came and sat down again.

‘I shan’t bear a grudge, Charlie. I dare say you feel I deserve a bit of a bashing after this morning. Not yourself yet, I mean to say.’

‘There is something in what you say,’ I said, truthfully, for there was something in what he said. ‘I have had a long day, full of mopery and mayhem. If I stay up any longer I am likely to make a serious error of judgment. Goodnight.’ With this I swept out of the room. Martland’s mouth was open again as I closed the door.

A brief, delicious session under the warm shower, a whisk of costly dentifrice around the old ivory castles, a puff of Johnson’s Baby Powder here and there, a dive between the sheets and I was my own man again. Krampf’s idiotic departure from his script worried me, perhaps more than the attempt on my own life now, but I felt that there was nothing which could not more profitably be worried about on the morrow which is, as is well known, another day.