The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(161)

‘Would you like some coffee?’ said Johanna.

That afternoon, all friends now and all full of luncheon – for I fancy Jock had scoffed a moody tin of caviare – we set off for a reconnaissance of the chapels, furnished with a capable picnic hamper in case the sun shone.

I’m sorry, but I shall have to explain about these chapels. There is a place in Grouville Parish, in the East of the Island, called La Hougue Bie. I believe no one is certain what the name means. It is a monstrous, man-made mound inside which, only excavated fifty years ago, there is a dolmen: a tomb made some five thousand years ago of great slabs of stone. To reach the main tomb-chamber you have to creep, bent double, for what seems a very long way indeed along a stone tunnel. If you are claustrophobic, or superstitious or simply a coward, then you will find it a dismal and grimly place indeed. I hate it for all three reasons and I hate, too, the thought of the brutish folk who built it; I loathe to speculate on what disgusting compulsion made them drag and raise those monstrous stones and then spade over them those countless tons of earth, all to encyst some frightful little prehistoric Hitler.

Nevertheless, I believe that we should all visit such a place from time to time, in order to remind ourselves how recently we sprang from the brutes.

Crowning the great mound and, curiously, exactly above the main tomb-chamber, someone in the twelfth century raised a decent little chapel dedicated to Notre Dame de la Clarté. A few centuries later another decent chap dug himself out a crypt in the pious – if mistaken – belief that it was a replica of the Holy Sepulchre itself, and then tacked another chapel onto the first. This latter is called the Jerusalem Chapel.

I didn’t go into the dolmen myself; once had been enough for me – I just don’t enjoy feeling my flesh crawl. Jock was prowling about the surrounding area looking absurdly like a professional crook but the nice tourists paid him no heed: they probably assumed he was a security-firm guard, there’s no telling the two apart, is there? Fr Tichborne, on the other hand, dived into the dank darkness of the tunnel with every sign of relish and emerged looking flushed and excited, like a young bishop with his first actress.

‘Do you have a portable tape-recorder?’ were his first words.

‘Of course I have, who hasn’t? But whatever for?’

‘Tell you tonight. After dinner.’ And with that he dived back into the hell-hole. I spent five instructive minutes in the excellent little Agricultural Museum near the mound, marvelling at the monstrous tools the tillers toiled with in the olden days. How they must have sweated, to be sure; it made me feel quite faint.

When Tichborne re-emerged we rounded up Jock and ‘cased’ the chapels. (‘Cased’, you understand, is a piece of thieves’ cant meaning ‘surveyed with intent to commit a felony’ – but I dare say that you, who must be the sort of person who reads this sort of story, would know that sort of thing already.)

The earlier chapel – Notre Dame de la Clarté – exhibited a notice saying that it had been ‘recoiled’ by some meddlesome bishop with too much time on his hands. Tichborne explained that this meant sort of re-consecrated and de-Romanized.

‘Drat it,’ he added petulantly.

The Jerusalem Chapel, however, displayed no such advertising matter and Tichborne said that it would do beautifully – almost certainly disused since they closed all the chantry-chapels after the Reformation thing in 1548, he told us.

‘Reelly?’ said Jock.

In the car going home we asked Jock whether it would be practicable to gain access to the chapel and dolmen by night in a clandestine fashion.

‘A doddle,’ he replied. ‘Just a doddle. The gate into the grounds isn’t worth opening, you can nip over it easy if your piles are better this week. Sorry, sir.’ (I was startled until I realized that ‘sir’ was meant for Tichborne – then I was a little piqued.) ‘That underground tomb,’ he went on, ‘has got a first-class padlock but the chain to it is no better than the common shit-house variety (beg pardon, sir) and a liddle old pair of wire-cutters will soon sort that out.’

‘Ah,’ said Tichborne, ‘but what about that formidable great iron lock to the chapel?’

Jock made a coarse noise by expelling air from between his closed lips.

‘That ain’t a formigal lock,’ he said contemptuously, ‘ ’t’ain’t even a Yale; it’s just big. I could open that bugger with me old …er, I could open that lock with any old bit of wire. No sweat.’

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘pray stop the car at the next decent inn or hostelry so that I may buy you a large and toothsome drink. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he stampeth out the corn” is what I say. So did Deuteronomy.’

‘XXV; 4,’ agreed Tichborne.

‘Reelly,’ said Jock.

That night, after dinner (I think it was Médaillons de Chevreuil S. Hubert au Purée de Marrons with a saucy little Chambertin on the side, unless it was a Friday, in which case Jock would have gone out to fetch fish and chips) that night, I say, I reminded Fr Tichborne about his interest in portable tape-recorders.

‘You were going to explain about portable tape-recorders,’ is how I put it to him.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I believe I was. Yes, so I was.’

His childlike eyes flitted about wildly as he sipped at Johanna’s incomparable, inherited brandy: one got the impression that it was not quite his bag, as the children say nowadays.