The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(139)

Nothing happened personally to me except that a funny thing happened to me at the Pistol and Rifle Club which I always attend on the first Thursday of the month.

I had decided to give my old and beautiful .455 Smith and Wesson Military and Police Model of 1902 an airing. The men there teased me about it as ever; most of them have amazing small-bore weapons with tailored handles and changeable sights, but they know that I can still make the pop-up man-sized target look pretty sick at standard Olympic range. Although I say it as shouldn’t. It weighs 2? pounds fully loaded and the barrel is 6 inches long; using the high-load, nickel-jacketed military ammunition it can punch holes in a brick wall and it makes a deafening and highly satisfying noise. Everyone with an organ-inferiority should have one. (Like, say, Bach?)

A nice police-sergeant made his usual joke about it, saying that if I bought it a pair of wheels I could get a commission in the Royal Artillery, and then the funny thing that happened to me was that he asked me if I had my bullets specially cast.

‘Yes, a nice chap in London,’ I said.

‘Lead?’ he asked. I was puzzled.

‘Of course, lead, what else?’

‘No, nothing, just asking. There’s a bloke here on the Island who’ll cast them in anything, if ever you need it.’

‘Well, thanks,’ I said, still puzzled.

That was the funny thing that happened.

I didn’t give it any more thought. I was too preoccupied with what always preoccupies me on the First of May: the essential swindle of all English months and May in particular. Why have we let the poets and, no doubt, politicians, sell us all this rubbish about the months? I mean, May conjures up the vision of happy, sun-burned maidens prancing on the village green and retiring at dusk to the nearest hedgerow to be turned into happy, sunburned, unmarried mothers-to-be; but the truth is that the pallid and pimply village maiden of today is waving her lumpish hips in a discotheque in the nearby town, munching a contraceptive pill while the rain roars down outside and the Babycham fizzes in its glass. Anyone braving a hedgerow in an English May, even in full oilskins, courts both pneumonia and insecticide-poisoning. Perhaps the only month which one can depend on is January, when the cold is always as promised and one can still sometimes hear the ring of skates on the frozen tarn and, if one is lucky, the shriek of a drowning skater.

When I say that nothing happened that day, I did not mean to suggest that nothing happened that night. Much did.

Johanna was watching lovingly as I mopped up the gravy of one of the finest coq-au-vins (coqs au vin?) of my life with a huge crust of crusty bread when the telephone rang.

‘Tell them I’m out,’ I snarled, ‘or dead, or bankrupt, I don’t care; but I’m not answering that machine, tell the Post Office to take it away in the morning, we’ll be better without it.’

‘It’s for you, Mr Charlie,’ said Jock a moment later.

‘Look, are you incapable of …’ I started, but then I saw Jock’s expression. I went to the telephone, wiping my lips. Sam was on the line. It was a Sam I had never heard.

‘Get round here, Charlie, fast. It’s Violet.’

‘You mean … ?’

‘Yes. Get here.’

I got. To be exact, I told Jock to get there on his motor-bike, carrying his low friend (perhaps glad to be free from the domino-lesson) on the pillion; while I bundled Johanna into the Mini. I knew she was probably safe from rapists (they rarely have the stamina to strike twice in one night) but I knew, too, that all women love to comfort their frailer sisters in adversity.

At La Gouluterie, Sam was in the courtyard, giving Jock and his domino-friend orders in the ugliest voice I have ever heard. He sent them off and turned to me.

‘Charlie, send Johanna up to Violet; the doctor and police are coming. Jock is patrolling on his motor-bike towards Belle Etoile Bay and back via Wutherings; his friend is working the fields – don’t shoot him by accident. You will drive me to Sion and I’ll work back from there. Then you will drive like hell to St John’s Church and come slowly back without lights. Are you armed?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Then grab anyone in trousers; if they can’t give a wholly satisfactory account of themselves force them into the car. I’ll pay any fines for wrongful arrest. Got all that? Then let’s go.’

‘What’s George doing?’

‘Nothing. They’re out.’

With that he opened a gun-case and assembled his beautiful Churchill XXV shotgun with a brutality which made me wince. Off we sped. We saw no one. I left him at Sion, drove fast to St John’s, crawled back, stopping to look and listen from time to time. One party of drunks arguing bitterly about football. One burly she-hitch-hiker from Wigan: she hadn’t seen anyone. One sinister chap who was a rapist if ever I saw one but he already had a local maiden with him: the dirty look she gave me indicated that she was actually hoping to lose her maiden status even if it meant braving a hedgerow and that I was delaying things. Her swain claimed to have heard, ten minutes earlier, a large motor-bike driving towards the Route Militaire very fast, then stopping. A few minutes later it had started up again and gone North, much more slowly. That had evidently been Jock: this lad, for all his saucy looks, was a good witness. His restless sacrifice was tugging at his sleeve, saying –

‘Ow, come on Norman, it’s none of our business,’ and so forth, so I attracted his interest by taking out the fat little Banker’s Special revolver and spinning the cylinder, as though to check the load. This fascinated him, it was the Wild West come true.