The Mortdecai Trilogy (31 page)

‘Mr Ho, would you like to bring the prisoner in, please?’ said the Commandant. He did not reply. I glanced at him: he was not there. I reckon that I can shift the Mortdecai carcass around fairly noiselessly but this man was quite uncanny; he was even better than old Wooster’s manservant who, as is well known, used to shimmer for England.

‘Mr Ho is the Red Stick for the Woh Singh Wo in England,’ said Johanna hurriedly. ‘That’s sort of, uh,
enforcer
.’ He was back in a twinkling, carrying the prisoner over his shoulder as casually as you or I might carry a beach-bag, if we were the kind of person who carries beach-bags.

‘Interrogate him,’ said the Commandant, ‘but please don’t make a mess. The carpet is a costly one.’ Mr Ho dumped the man on the floor, took a plastic Pak-a-Mak out of his pocket and threw it
at him. The man unrolled it, lay down tidily on it. He was quite naked except for a bandage on his face where my bullet had hit him but his other eye was open and alert. He showed no signs of fear except that his penis had sort of shrivelled up as though he had just come out of a cold bath.

‘If you’re going to torture him,’ I said, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Probabry not necessary,’ said Mr Ho. ‘If he is professional, will know I can make him talk, will not waste our time. Most torture is crap; it amuses torturer onry; makes innocent man confess to anything, makes guilty man rie, makes stupid man dead too soon. Gestapo rubbish.

‘Professional torture simple.

‘First, hut very much at beginning. Most peopre do not rearise how much pain huts.

‘Second, remove male members. Most peopre talk before this.

‘Third, remove eyesight.

‘Fourth, promise quick death. That is all. Watch.’

He produced a black doctor’s bag. I trembled at the thought of the dreadful instruments he would take out of it but the contents were positively homely. One ordinary electric iron, which he placed tidily at the soles of the prisoner’s feet. He did not plug it in. The prisoner raised himself on one elbow and watched dispassionately. Then Ho laid a coil of thin wire with wooden handles at each and – such as grocers use for cutting cheese – on the man’s genitals. The man’s face did not display any emotion but his penis seemed to shrivel a little more. Then Ho produced a teaspoon and laid it on the carpet at the level of the man’s remaining eyeball and a long, tenpenny nail which he laid on the man’s left breast.

The man seemed to appraise these ordinary, workaday objects – how sensible of Mr Ho to carry nothing incriminating – and came to a decision. He uttered a series of polite, deprecating quacks in what was probably Cantonese.

‘There!’ said Mr Ho kindly. ‘He is professional. Says he knows one thing. Only one. Will say it, if kill quick; now. OK?’

Mr Ho cleared away everything except the long, tenpenny nail, which he left over the man’s heart. The man rattled off a string of syllables in the same polite and unemotional tones he had used before. Mr Ho wrote things on a piece of paper and handed it to the Commandant.

‘And what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ she bellowed. Johanna took the slip of paper and shook her head, passed it to me.

‘It’s a map-reference,’ I said in my cold, war-experienced, adjutant’s voice. ‘LSE64 is the sheet number, Ordnance Survey. H6 is the kilometre square. 625975 is the ground reference.’ The Commandant snatched it and pressed a tit on her buzzer-console, asked for ‘Library’ and told someone called Annie to find sheet LSE6
₄
and that right speedily. We waited, in silence and various degrees of fraughtness. Apart from Mr Ho, the least agitated member of our tea-party was the Chinese prisoner, who was gazing absorbedly up the Commandant’s skirt. I was glad to note that his penis had unshrivelled itself a goodish bit. Ah well, whatever turns you on. For my part, I’d hate to go to eternal bliss with the memory of an old bull-dyke’s directoire knickers imprinted on my retina for all eternity but that’s what makes horse-races, isn’t it?

Annie the Librarian brought in the map. Johanna and the Commandant looked at it. Rather in the way they had looked at me.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Johanna.

‘Oh, shit,’ said the Commandant in her coarse way. ‘They know where, er, our man er
you-know-who
is.’ She tried to work out the six-figure reference and snarled. I explained that the first figures go laterally, the others vertically. ‘You must put it across a woman before you can get it up her,’ I explained, quoting an old Army mnemonic. They glared at me but let me find the spot. It was an
ANCIENT FORT
overlooking a main road in a featureless waste of Yorkshire moorland.

‘Mortdecai must go,’ said the Commandant briskly. ‘He’s expendable.’

‘Hoy!’ I protested.

‘Sibyl didn’t mean it like that, Charlie dear,’ said Johanna worriedly.

‘Also he’s crafty; a survivor; can shoot a bit,’ added the Commandant, hoping to mollify me. She addressed herself to her buzzer-console again: ‘Sandwiches for two days please, kitchen: high-protein ones, none of your fancy egg-and-salad; one litre flask of strong black coffee, no sugar; one litre bottle of Scotch
whisky. To be in Mr Mortdecai’s car, which will be at the door in five minutes exactly.’

‘How do you know I don’t take sugar?’ I asked rebelliously.

‘
No
gentleman takes sugar in black coffee. Besides, it’s bad for you. No, I’m not talking about your disgraceful waistline. Sugar and alcohol together trigger off your insulin and give you hypoglycaemia – symptoms are faulty judgment, undue fatigue, anxiety, inner trembling.’

‘I get the last two when ordered to go and find people called
you-know-who
on lonely Yorkshire moors at five minutes notice,’ I retorted. ‘Anyhow, how do I recognize this chap, how will he recognize me and what do I do if I find him?’

‘He will be on foot, if we’re lucky,’ she said cryptically. ‘He answers to the name of Freddie. Just tell him what has happened and he’ll know you’re genuine.’

‘Thank God I don’t have to approach a complete stranger and whisper to him that the moon is shining brightly and wait for him to say that the price of fish and chips is going up,’ I quipped.

‘Try not to babble, Charlie dear.’

‘If possible, get him out of there fast, and back here in one piece. If he can’t come, take a message. If he’s, ah, unable to speak, search him.’

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said simply.

‘I see.’

‘Now, pop upstairs, get warm clothes, stout shoes and a couple of clips of cartridges. The real ones.’

‘What about him?’ I asked, indicating the patient prisoner. ‘He’s heard all this; probably understands English. And shouldn’t someone see to his poor eye?’

‘Irrelevant,’ she said absently, ‘he’s been promised a quick death – a kindness really, because if we were to let him go his friends would give him a slow and exceedingly nasty one. Mr Ho?’

She gave Ho a half-tumbler of raw vodka which he handed to the naked chap. The chap tossed it off in one gulp, nodded appreciatively. Mr Ho gave him a lighted cigarette. He took two deep and happy drags then ground it out on the carpet (in his place I’d have said I was trying to give them up, of course; I couldn’t have wasted such an opportunity). Then he lay down again on
the Pak-a-Mak and made not a tremor as Ho knelt beside him, measured off one hand’s-breadth below the left nipple and, finding the space between the appropriate ribs, positioned the point of the six-inch nail, holding it in place with an index finger on its head. Then Ho turned to me and politely said, ‘Prease, he try to kill you – you wanna kill him?’

‘Goodness, no,’ I gabbled, ‘I mean thanks awfully, kind of you, very, but I’ve already killed one chap today and I’m trying to …’

‘Mr Ho,’ said the Commandant, ‘I think it might be better if you did it outside. You’ll find a girl called Fiona at the kennels, she’ll show you where the graves are.’

Mr Ho left the room in a marked manner – a little hurt, I fancy – the prisoner folded the Pak-a-Mak neatly, bobbed politely to the company and trotted off behind him.

I hope that, when my own three oranges turn up on the Celestial fruit-machine, I shall accept the jackpot of mortality with as much dignity.

‘Goodbye, Charlie dear,’ said Johanna. ‘Drive carefully.’

‘Good luck, Mortdecai,’ said the Commandant gruffly.

‘Yes,’ is what I said.

What does little birdie say
In her nest at peep of day?

 

Sea Dreams

 

I must say I do approve of seagulls. Most petty criminals nowadays are so bad at their jobs – don’t you agree? – while gulls are as dedicated as traffic-wardens and a great deal cheerier about their chosen vocation. They (the seagulls) gather in the grey light of dawn, shouting dirty jokes at each other and screaming with ribald laughter, waking up slug-a-beds like you and me, then when they have decided what to do that day, off they fly – and how good they are at flying, not an erg of energy wasted – scrounging, stealing, murdering and generally fulfilling their slots in the ecology. At lunchtime, when we are munching our first brandy-and-soda of the day, they congregate again in some spacious field, their bellies full for the nonce, and stand there in silence, sensibly digesting and
loafing
until it is time for another worm or two (in the case of the little Black-headed sort) or a tasty dead dog (in the case of the Greater Black-backed buggers). How wonderfully uplifting it is to watch them wheeling and swooping in the wake of a car-ferry, waiting for idiots to purchase British Rail sandwiches and throw them overboard after one disgustful bite! The very poetry of motion!

When all the world and I were young and people still knew their proper stations in life, seagulls were something that happened at sea, only occasionally calling in at the shore to defecate on your nice new sun-hat so that Nursey could give you a bad time. Nowadays you see them everywhere, raiding dustbins and queueing up outside fish-and-chip shops instead of swimming in their nice oil-slicks and eating up their nice, freshly polluted herring-guts.

The assorted seagulls who were grouped at the foot of the
ANCIENT FORT
were not exhibiting the poetry of motion, nor where they loafing, nor yelling like spoiled brats as seagulls should.
Waiting
is what they were doing. Waiting around a bundle of old rags. As I drew nearer they all rose into the air in a sulky fashion, except for a Greater Black-backed (
Larus Marinus
), big as a Michaelmas goose, who remained perched on the bundle of rags. Foraging for something. I broke into a run. The gull’s beak emerged from the raggedy man’s face, gulping something white and glistening from which scarlet ribbons hung. The bird gave me a murderous, yellow-rimmed glance from one of its eyeballs then flapped insolently away. I had nothing to throw at it.

When I had finished vomiting, I turned the raggedy man over onto his face and ran down the fell-side to the road. I should of course have searched him as ordered but, to tell the truth, I was filled with horror at the thought that he might still be alive. That may sound strange to you but you weren’t there, were you? I had, of course, left my car some miles away and had walked across the moors to the map-reference and the
ANCIENT FORT
and the raggedy man. I waved down a passing car and had great trouble persuading the television-sodden driver that he was not on ‘Candid Camera’ and that no, I really wasn’t Robert Morley, before he became grudgingly convinced that a man was actually dying or dead and that he must take me to the nearest telephone. From there I telephoned Blucher’s secretary and gave her all the
nu
’s that were fit to print.

‘Wait there,’ she ordered. Since I still had one and one-half sandwiches and an almost-full pocket flask I fell in with her wishes. Night, too, fell. One hundred years and one almost-full pocket-flask later a Cocteau-like motor-bicycle policeman came roaring out of the gloaming, followed in a few moments by a ‘bad-news wagon’ (that means a police-car,
hypocrite lecteur
) and an ambulance. I led
them all up to the
ANCIENT FORT
breaking each of my legs several times en route. There were several brief altercations: when the Sergeant berated me for having turned the raggedy chap over onto his face ‘thus possibly destroying evidence’. I explained that certain feathered friends had been destroying evidence even more effectively. He did not believe me until they turned the chap over onto his back again, whereupon the dashing, fearless motor-bike copper was ill all over the Sergeant’s brand-new shoes, starting another altercation which, conjoined with the ambulance-men’s bitter discussion about overtime, fairly made the welkin ring. I found it all a bit sordid.

‘Trotskyist pig!’

‘They cost me nineteen pounds ninety-five only last week!’

‘Get no bloody home-life in this job, do we?’

‘Filthy Maoist revisionary!’

‘I should afford such shoes on my pay.’

‘Got the shop-steward in your pockets, haven’t you, eh?’

‘They’re supposed to have the rubbed-off wet-look and look at the buggers now!’

‘Well, at least I’m not in the bosses’ pockets, I can say that …’

‘Drop of turps will have ’em good as new in no time …’

‘No, it’s not the bosses’
pockets
you’re in, comrade …’

‘You calling me a brown-nose, brother?’

I stole away, murmuring ‘Oh dear, oh dear’ and musing on dialectical materialism and the Majesty of the Law. I was quite right: I had indeed left almost half a sandwich in the telephone-box. It occurred to me to telephone Blucher again, hoping to get him in person this time. He was not in the least amused. Had I searched the man? Why not? Was the chap dead? What did I mean I wasn’t sure? Why wasn’t I there beside him, watching every move of every copper? I began to feel like Macbeth in Act II, Scene 2, where his wife says ‘Infirm of purpose; give me the daggers,’ when the door of the booth or kiosk was flung open and the Sergeant demanded to be told who it was that I was telephoning.

‘Sweet, cuddlesome dreams, my own dearest little fluffy-puss,’ I said into the receiver as I replaced it in a dignified fashion, before turning upon the fellow and raising a brace of icy eyebrows. (I yield to none when it comes to eyebrow-raising; I was taught by my father himself, who could have eyebrow-raised for Great Britain had he
not been so haughty.) The Sergeant cringed a little, as I had been cringing under the lash of Blucher’s ice-maiden voice. This cringing of his gave me time to wonder what kind of pressure Blucher could have applied – and to whom – and what I was supposed to do – or be.

The necessary, hasty trip to the mortuary over, we all pitched up at the cop-shop of the county town – I cannot remember its name but I shall always think of it as Heckmondwyke – where I was given great mugs of tea and met an Inspector of Detectives who positively bulged with intelligence and well-feigned friendliness. He asked me only the most natural and obvious questions then told me courteously that a room was booked for me at the cleaner of the two local hostelries and that the Detective Sergeant would take me there. Oh yes, and would pick me up in the morning, so that we could foregather at the morgue.

‘Didn’t seem awfully interested, did he?’ I said nonchalantly as the Sergeant decanted me in front of what I suppose I must call the hotel.

‘Well, only an old tramp,’ said the Sergeant.

‘Ah,’ I said.

Dinner was ‘off’, of course, for it was by now quite eight o’clock, but an embittered crone, after I had bribed her richly, made me a bowl of soup and something called am-an-eggs. The soup was not good but she had at least taken the packet off before adding the warm water. I prefer not to discuss the am-an-eggs.

It would be idle to pretend that I slept well.

Well, there we were next morning, all well-washed, shaven, aftershave fragrant; costly our habits as our purse could buy. (Indeed, rather costlier in the case of the Detective Constable: policemen in expensive suits
worry
me.) It was shaming to look at the dirty old corpse on the mortuary slab. Refrigeration had only a little abated the richness of his bodily odours. His mouth gaped open in a derisive way; the teeth in his mouth were few – and few of them could have met. The Inspector took his time looking at the teeth.

‘Even a tramp,’ I said crossly, from my guilty heart and from between well-dentifriced ivory-castles, ‘even a tramp could have got himself a set of gnashers from the National Health. I mean, dammit.’

‘That’s right,’ said the Inspector as he rose from peering into the carrion old mouth.

We trooped into the room where the tramp’s pitiful clothes and other gear were laid out on a trestle-table, together with the prescribed three copies of the list of these possessions. Our nostrils were assailed with the cloying horror of a lavender-flavoured aerosol ‘air-freshener’ and the Inspector snarled at the uniformed bloke in charge.

‘I might have wanted to
smell
these things,’ is what he snarled.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Anything that turns you on …’ murmured the Detective Constable by the door. The Inspector pretended not to have heard – help is hard to come by these days and, in any case, he had noticed the Detective Sergeant’s deadly glance at the DC: the glance which says that certain DC’s are going to find themselves lumbered with a nasty little bit of extra duty tomorrow.

The objects laid out on the trestle-table were not a suitable sight for the squeamish. In the matter of underclothes the deceased’s policy seemed to have been ‘live and let live’, not to mention ‘increase and multiply’. There were several layers of these intimate garments and its was apparent that the local police had not found a volunteer to separate them. The Inspector braced himself and went about the task himself: he was a man of iron. Then he checked, against the list, the pitiful, trumpery possessions from the corpse’s pockets and haversack. He checked them as minutely as a prosecuting attorney might scan President Nixon’s Christmas-present list.

There were ancient, nameless scraps of what might once have been food. There was a retired baked-beans tin with two holes in the edges to take a loop of wire; the inside was caked with tea, the outside with soot. There was a twist of plug-tobacco engraved with tooth-marks: whether by man or beast it would be hard to say. There was a cheap, blunt, celluloid-handled penknife of the sort which is made to sell. To schoolboys. Something stirred in my mind. There was a piece of soap, gnarled and grime-fissured. A tin box containing a dozen red-top matches and half an inch of candle. A coloured photograph from a ‘girlie’ magazine – a ‘beaver-shot’ as they call it, much creased and be-thumbed. An onion, the sweating heel of a piece of cheese and some cold fried
potatoes, neatly packed in one of those foil-lined cartons they use in Chinese take-away restaurants. Grubby twists of paper containing sugar, tea, salt … ah, well, you know the sort of thing. Or perhaps you don’t; lucky you.

Oh yes, and there was a nice, clean £10 note.

The Inspector at last rose from his absurdly detailed inspection of the chattels, blew his nose and shook himself like a dog.

‘Not a tramp,’ he said. His voice was flat; he was not accusing anyone.

‘Not?’ I asked after a pause.

‘But …’ said the Sergeant after a longer pause.

‘Sir!’ huffed the DC.

‘Use your eyes, lad,’ said the Inspector. ‘The facts are as plain as the nose on your face.’ The DC, being well-gifted in the nose-department, fell silent. This was the point at which I began to take the Inspector seriously.

After he had signed receipts and things and had shrugged off his subordinates he carried me off to the cop-shop canteen, where he regaled me with delectable tea and the finest and crispest ham-rolls I have ever sunk tooth into.

‘Well,’ I said, when the crust-munching noises had died down, ‘are you going to tell me or not?’

‘Teeth and toenails,’ he answered cryptically.

‘Eh?’

‘Aye. No blame to you for not noticing, but those twits out there are supposed to have been taught to use their eyes.’

I kept my mouth shut. I, too, had been taught things of that kind long ago, but there was no profit in telling him the story of my life and I hoped, in any case, to hear him spell out his thoughts as to an innocent bystander, for there is no more rewarding experience than to listen to a man who is really good at his job. This man was very good.

‘First,’ he said, licking a trace of mustard from a capable thumb, ‘when did you last see a genuine old-fashioned foot-tramp in England?’

‘Why, now I come to think of it, not for a hell of a long time. Used to be part of the landscape, didn’t they, but I can’t say that I –’

‘Right. I said
foot
-tramp to rule out Romanies and didicoys and such. I don’t reckon there’s six real tramps walking the roads of
England today and there haven’t been since, oh, about 1960. The casual-wards are all closed down, so are the pay-flops; and the Rowton Houses are all turning into Commercial Hotels. They say there’s a few old stagers still trudging Wild Wales, but that’s it.

‘Moreover, your real old tramp used to have a regular beat of about two hundred miles, so he’d pass through any given “manor” maybe once in a good summer and three times in winter. Even those morons out there who call themselves detectives would certainly know any walking-gent who went through the manor regular.’

‘Meths-drinker?’ I asked.

‘No. None of the signs. And meths-drinkers haven’t the strength to walk any distance. And they usually have a flat half-bottle of the rubbish taped to the small of their back in case they get nicked. And they don’t eat. Our man liked his food – if you can call it food.’

‘So?’

‘So, second,’ he said, examining his forefinger for any lingering mustard, ‘you were dead right when you worried that he’d not got himself a set of dining-snappers off the National Health. In fact, as a glance at his gums and canines would have told any
real
policeman, he had once owned a costly set of bridgework – not your National Health sort – and had only parted with them a few months ago. Say, about the time he took his last bath.’

‘And third?’ I prompted.

‘Third,’ he said, holding up his middle finger in a gesture which would be considered vulgar in Italy, ‘third, no scissors.’