The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(146)

‘Well now,’ said Dryden, when the beaded bubbles of Chivas Regal were winking at the brim, ‘I gather that you have taken up the worship of Wicca and find that it compels you to range around the countryside stealing ducks.’

‘No, no, no, John, you must have mis-heard me on the telephone: duck was not the word I used and it’s not me at all, it’s some other chap.’

That’s what they all say,’ kindly, sadly, ‘but tell me all about your, ah, friend.’

He was, of course, teasing me, and he knew very well that I knew that he knew that I knew he was, if I make myself clear. I started from the beginning, for I am not skilled in narrative, and went on to the end. It electrified him; he sat up straight and poured profligate drinks for both of us.

‘Well, I do call that splendid,’ he chortled, rubbing his big, pink hands together. (Can you chortle, by the way? I can giggle and snigger but chortling and chuckling are quite out of my range. It’s a dying art, some modern Cecil Sharp should go around recording the last few practitioners.)

‘How do you mean, splendid?’ I asked when the chortling was over. ‘My friends and their wives don’t think it’s a bit splendid, I can tell you.’

‘Of course, of course. Forgive me. My heart goes out to them. What I meant was that in the midst of all this bogus satanist revival that’s going on it’s rather gratifying to a scholar that a serious recrudescence of the real tradition is taking place in just the sort of base and backward community where one had hoped the last embers of the Old Religion might, indeed, still be glowing.’ (What lovely sentences he constructs. I wish I could write one half so well as he talks.)

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it’s all there: the desecration of Easter for a start. It probably starts at Easter every year, you know, but few victims of ravishment ever complain to the police for reasons which doubtless spring to your mind; the counter-accusations and cross-examinations at the trial can be most shaming in cases of this kind. Moreover, the sturdy native Jersey women would, for the most part, appreciate that they had been singled out for what amounts to a religious rite – it is just as if an Englishwoman were told by the Vicar that it was her turn to do the flowers in Church for Easter: a nuisance but an honour. Do you follow me?’



‘So far I’m abreast of you.’

‘Then there’s the inverted cross –’





‘What inverted cross?’ I interrupted.

‘Why the one on the witchmaster’s belly, to be sure; hadn’t you twigged? The ladies would naturally have thought it to be a sword and it may well have been pointed at the top to represent the woven crosses they give out in churches on Palm Sunday, this combining an insult to Christianity and an ancient sex-symbol. Do you happen to know what colour it was?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Try and find out, there’s a dear boy. And find out whether it left any paint marks: it would be quite splendid – that is to say, very interesting – if it proved not to be painted at all but pyschosomatically produced. The body can do wonderful things, as I’m sure you know, under hypnosis or auto-induced hysteria. The stigmata, of course, springs to mind, and levitation: there’s far too much evidence to dismiss.’

I shot him a furtive look. He was displaying just a little too much zeal for his hobby-horse; committedness is next to pottiness, especially in elderly dons.

‘You are thinking that I am riding my hobby-horse a little hard,’ he said – beaming at my guilty start – ‘and I confess to finding the subject almost unwholesomely engaging.’

I mumbled a few disclaimers which he waved aside.

‘The words “hobby-horse” and “levitation”,’ he resumed, ‘bring us to the next point, the riding-jollop.’

‘How’s that again?’

‘Riding-jollop. There are many names for it but the formulae are all very similar. It is the pungent mixture a witch smears on his or her body before going to the Sabbat. The greasy base stops up the pores and thus subtly alters the body’s chemistry, another ingredient reddens and excites the skin, while the bizarre stench – added to the guilty knowledge of what the jollop is made of – heightens the witch’s impure excitement to the point where he knows that he can fly. In the case of she-witches, a canter round the kitchen with the broom-stick between her legs adds a little extra elation, no doubt.’

‘No doubt,’ I agreed.

‘Whether any of them succeeds in flying is an open question: it is their certain conviction that they can that is important. Do you care to know the ingredients of the jollop?’

‘No thanks. My dinner sits a little queasily on my stomach as it is.’

‘You are probably wise. By the bye, did you happen to notice in your local paper that any new-born babies had been missing shortly before Easter?’

‘Whatever has that –?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, I see; how very nasty. Do they really? No, I wouldn’t have noticed that sort of thing. People shouldn’t have babies if they’re not prepared to look after them is what my old nanny used to say.’

‘You might just check, dear boy. It would have been in the dark of the moon before Easter. But of course it might have been the sort of baby which doesn’t get recorded. You know, “ditch-delivered of a drab”.’