The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(136)

The material I wanted was dispersed and hard to find, for I particularly did not want to enlist the librarian’s help, and, when I found it, a great deal was in Patois Jersiais and the rest in antique Norman-French. A sample of Patois will, I think, give you an idea of the horrors of that tongue: ‘S’lou iou que l’vent est quand l’soleit s’couoche la séthée d’la S. Miché, ché s’la qu’nous etha l’vent pour l’hivé.’ This is supposed to mean that the direction of the wind at sunset on Michaelmas Day will be the prevailing wind throughout the following winter – a likely story, I must say.

I staggered out into the evening sunshine and the monstrous regiment of tourists with my head buzzing-full of recondite information. It was clear that scholarship of that kind was not for Mortdecai: a specialist was called for. Nevertheless, I now knew a few things about Paisnel which the police didn’t. For instance, both he and his china toad had indeed been ‘part of something’; something which is supposed to have died three hundred years ago, something almost as nasty as the people who stamped it out – or thought they had.

Johanna was out when I arrived at the flat; she would be playing bridge, the least strenuous of her vices, bless her. With luck she would get home very late and too tired for romps.

I wrote to Hatchards for a copy of Malleus Maleficarum, that great compendium of medieval horrors, and begged them, with many an underlining, to see that it was in English.

Jock and I, on friendly terms again, feasted in the kitchen on pork chops, fried peas and mashed potatoes, capping them with a croque-monsieur in case of night starvation.

Then, aiding digestion with a bottle of Mr Teacher’s best and brightest, we watched Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca, that flawless pearl of a film. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. If television didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it, is what I say.

I was in hoggish slumber when Johanna climbed into my bed, she was glowing with the radiance of a woman who has just won more than eighty pounds from a close friend. She spends at least that sum each month on her breakfast champagne but her pleasure was intense and she tried to communicate it to me in her own special way.

‘No, please,’ I protested, ‘it’s very late and I am suffering from Excess at Table.’

‘Well at least tell me what happened today,’ she pouted. ‘Did you catch the Fiend in Human Shape?’

‘We didn’t look. We’ve decided that all we can do for the present is lay our ears to the ground and hope for gossip. But we did meet a lovely Centenier who told us all about the local sex-maniacs.’

She listened, saucer-eyed, as I related all I could remember about the neighbourhood satyrs.

‘And in St John’s,’ I ended, ‘there’s a well-respected man who does it with calves: what do you say to that?’

She rolled over on to all fours, her delightful bottom coquettishly raised.

‘Mooo?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Oh, very well.’





4





His speech is a burning fire;

With his lips he travaileth;

In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;

He weaves, and is clothed with derision;

Sows, and he shall not reap;

His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.





Atlanta





‘Jock,’ I said to Jock as I sipped the blessed second cup of the true Earl Grey’s Blend on the morning of Easter Wednesday. (I suppose there is an Easter Wednesday? For my part the only moveable feast which has any charms is the saddle-of-mutton trolley at Simpson’s.)

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘although you are but a rough, untutored fellow I have observed in you certain qualities which I prize. For once I do not refer to your heaven-sent gifts with the teapot and the frying-pan but to another, rarer talent.’

He moved his head slightly, so that his glass eye could give me a non-committal look.

‘I refer, on this occasion, to your innate ability to get into conversations, eternal friendships and fights with chaps in pubs.’

‘Hunh. You gave me a right bad time when I had me last little punch-up, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, well, but that was because you killed the chap, wasn’t it, and I’ve told you and told you not to, and you know what it does to my digestion, and I had to tell fibs to the police about you having been with me all evening watching Molière on the television and they didn’t believe a word of it, did they?’

He gave me his juiciest smile, the one that still frightens even me, the one which exposes a single, long, yellow fang nestling on his liver-hued nether lip.

Be that as it may,’ I went on, ‘this gift or knack of yours shall now be usefully employed. Here are ten pounds, the finest that the Bailiwick of Jersey can print. You are to lay them out on beer, cider, rum or whatever pleases your actual rebarbative Jerseyman. Do not buy drinks for any but true-born Jerseymen. They are the ones who will know.’

‘Know what, Mr Charlie?’

‘Know who was where on Easter Monday. Know who is the sort of chap who would climb up a perilous wistaria to slake his lawless lust; know who still takes part in very old-fashioned and naughty revels – and know, perhaps, who keeps a china toad on his, ah, mantelpiece.’