The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(120)

We sped further eastward, now in parts of London quite unfamiliar to me.

‘Where is “home”, please?’ I asked.

The Englishman answered this time. ‘Home’s where the heart is,’ he said with all the jovial smugness of a large man holding a large pistol. ‘We’re just taking you somewhere nice and quiet where they can ask you a few questions, then if your lady wife delivers Mr Ree to Gerrard Street within twenty-four hours we let you go, don’t we?’

‘Shot OP!’ said the Dutchman. He seemed to be in charge. Those few words had made my day, however, for it was now clear that they were but the minions of another ‘they’ who needed to know something that I knew and that I was also a valuable hostage. I was more than ever sure that this was not a time for people to blow holes through the Mortdecai kidneys.

When we came to a complicated road-junction, crammed with traffic and well-populated with uniformed policemen, I murmured to the Dutch chap that we drove on the left in England. He was, as a matter of fact, doing so but it gave him pause and the wheel wobbled. I snatched the ignition keys; the car stalled in the midst of a welter of furious traffic and I sprang out. Sure enough, they didn’t shoot at me. I ran over to the nearest ‘Old Bill’, gabbled that the driver was having a heart attack and where was the nearest telephone. He pointed to a kiosk then stamped majestically towards the car, which was now the centre of a tumult of block traffic.

In the kiosk I frantically dialled my own number and rammed in a wasteful 10p piece. Johanna answered from the dressing-room extension which had not been noticed.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m in a phone-box, corner of …’ I read off what it said on the instrument ‘ … and I’ve got away from them but not for long. I’ll be …’ I frantically looked out of the kiosk, saw a great, grubby, warehouse-like building opposite with a name on it ‘ … Mycock’s Farm-cured Bacon,’ I read out.

‘This is no time for jokes, Charlie dear.’

‘Just get Jock here; fast.’ I replaced the receiver, did not even spare the time to check the returned coins box. I ran towards the excellent Mr Mycock. Inside the door an elderly slattern, redolent of Jeyes’ Fluid, pointed to where the guvnor would be. ‘He’s probably having his dinner,’ she added. ‘Out of a bottle.’ As soon as she was out of sight I changed direction again and again, diving into the abattoir’s labyrinth. The pong of scorched pig became excruciating; I longed for that Jeyes’ Fluid. The air was split by an appalling shriek – it was the dinner-time whistle but it gave me a bad moment. I pulled myself together, affecting the arrogant stroll of a Ministry of Health official looking for the germ Clostridium Botulinum. The workers who thronged out past me did not even spare me a glance, they were off to chance paratyphoid from beef pies at The Bunch of Grapes; they wouldn’t eat pork pies, they’d seen them being made. As I stalked proudly through the corridors, turning randomly every now and again in a purposeful sort of way, I was doing feverish sums in mental arithmetic concerned with how quickly Jock could possibly get here. It’s all very well being clever and devious, you see, but when you are eyeball-deep in lethal shit you need a thug – a thug who has coped with such situations since his first term in Borstal. Jock is just such a thug – few art-dealers could afford him – and I was confident that he would make all speed to the Mycock cochonnerie and would be properly equipped with one pair of brass knuckles, one Luger and, if he had been able to find the key, one Banker’s Special Revolver such as I keep in my bedside table. Twenty minutes was how I had the race handicapped. I had to survive for just twenty minutes.

I squeezed past a cluster of bins marked PET-FOOD ONLY: WASH HANDS AFTER HANDLING and was about to thread my way through another lot marked IRELAND AND BELGIUM ONLY when I saw a large chap about thirty feet away, holding a pistol with two hands. He was the Dutchman. The pistol was pointed at me. The two-handed grip was perfectly good procedure according to the book they teach policemen with, but it seemed to me that if he was any good with that thing he would, at that range, have been holding it in one hand, pointing it at the ground a couple of yards in front of his feet. All the same, I froze, as any sensible chap would.

‘Comm, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said persuasively, ‘comm; you have donn the teatricals. Yost comm with the honds behind the head and no one will hort you.’ I started to breathe deeply; in, count ten, out – this is supposed to hyperoxygenate the system. Added to the adrenalin which was sloshing around in my blood-vessels, it had a salutary effect: I felt convinced that I could have held Cassius Clay for quite two rounds. Unless he got me against the ropes, of course.

I went on hyperoxygenating; the Dutchman’s pistol roved up and down from my privates to my forehead. He was the first to become bored.

‘Mr Mortdecai,’ he said in a dangerous voice, ‘are you comming now?’ Well, I couldn’t resist a straight line like that, could I?

‘No,’ I said, ‘just breathing hard.’ While he was thinking about that I feinted a dive to the left, then, for my life, plunged to the right, behind the friendly bins of pig-pieces. ‘Rooty-toot-toot-toot’ went his shooter. One round went howling off the wall, the others pierced the bins. He was not quite as bad as I had thought but he was not as good as he thought. That two-handed grip, you see, gives you a grand one-off first shot but when you swing to another target you invariably loose off too soon. The good pistol-shooter always lowers his weapon when tracking the second target and only raises it again when he has it cold. Ask anyone. Wyatt Earp, for instance.