The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(11)

‘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 The Assistant Commissioner, who had seen certain unpublished material about the Chum in a newspaper editor’s safe, shied like a startled stallion.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.