The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(170)
In any case, it was just then that the door burst open and all sorts of Centeniers, Vingteniers, Connétable’s officers, aye and even members of the dread Paid Police themselves, thronged in and arrested every one of us again and again.
Now, according to my plans, you see, we should have been neatly arrested, charged with breaking and entering, and fined some five bob each the next day, giving enough details to enable the Jersey Evening Post to make it known to one and all – and particularly, of course, to the witchmaster rapist chap – that the Mass of St Sécaire had in fact been held, with him as the objective. I had, perhaps rather coyly, not made it perfectly clear to George and Sam that we should probably all have to spend the night in durance vile: that is to say, what you and I call ‘the nick’ – I don’t like to cause people premonitory pain, do you? – and of course they would not, in any case, have agreed to the notion.
As it turned out, neither Sam nor George had really pulled himself together before we arrived at the Cop-shop in Rouge Bouillon, nor did they fully understand that they were to be the involuntary guests of the Deputy Lieutenant and Commander-in-Chief of Jersey until they – we – were issued with two blankets apiece, a cup of cocoa and a capital piece of bread and dripping, which I for one was ready for. Luckily, there were plenty of cells – the tourist season had scarcely begun – so that I had one all to myself and was spared any recriminations which my friends might otherwise, in the heat of the moment, have thought fit to heap upon me. The infinitely kindly policeman-gaoler permitted me to keep my briefcase of pyjamas, sandwiches and Scotch, exacting only a token tribute from the last. I shall not pretend that I slept well but at least I brushed my teeth, unlike some I could name.
12
Where the dead red leaves of the years lie rotten,
The cold old crimes and the deeds thrown by,
The misconceived and the misbegotten,
I would find a sin to do ere I die,
Sure to dissolve and destroy me all through …
The Triumph of Time
We who assembled in the Commander’s office at half-past eight the next morning were but a moody crew. George and Sam seemed to be harbouring some petty resentment about the fact that I had had the simple foresight to pack my toothbrush and things. Perhaps, too, they just didn’t like being locked up: there are people like that.
George was stalking up and down, four paces to the left, four to the right, like the captain of a very small ship pacing whatever it is that master-mariners pace. He was snarling a string of names of influential people, all of whom, he made it clear, he was about to telephone, and in the order named. Sam sat in a sort of collapsed lump: like me, he is a lovely talker when he has had his pre-luncheon drinks, but not before, really.
When George had exhausted his mental address-book, the Commander of Detectives cleared his throat in a way that gave the merest hint of smugness.
‘Grave charges,’ he said. ‘Graver, perhaps, than you realize. Certainly graver than we had anticipated. Serious view they’ll take of it. Serious. Unacceptable, you see.’
Sam made a brief reference to the Southern end of the digestive tract, in the plural, then relapsed into his lump.
‘No, no, sir,’ said the C of D, ‘that doesn’t help a bit, not that attitude doesn’t. Constructive is the word. Let’s be constructive. See what we can work out. Least harmful, least publicity, least cost to the taxpayer, eh?’
Sam made a suggestion which might or might not have given pleasure to the average taxpayer.
‘There you are again, you see, sir. Interesting biologically but not what you’d call constructive. Lucky we haven’t got a police stenographer in here, eh?’ The gentle threat floated gently to the ground. Sam grumbled, ‘Sorry’, and George said, ‘Hrrmph’. I said that I wasn’t used to drinking cocoa for breakfast. The C of D produced his whisky bottle in an insulting fashion.
Then he explained to us, with thinly-disguised relish, that we were up an improbably-named creek in a concrete canoe without a paddle and that the kindest thing he could do, before clapping us into his deepest dungeon, was to allow us to make one telephone call each. George’s advocate, the grandest imaginable, kept on saying ‘oh dear, oh dear’, until George slammed the instrument down. Sam’s advocate seemed to be saying ‘oy oy, oy oy’ until Sam told him curtly that he wanted no moaning at the bar.
My own chap is but a mere solicitor and his reaction was crisp. ‘Put the copper on,’ he said, crisply.
Two minutes later the C of D told us, crisply, that it had just occurred to him that he couldn’t hold us until he could think of some better charges and that, if we were prepared to go through a trifling formality at the box-office, we were free to go for the time being.
We went. I was prepared to chat freely on the way home but the others seemed both tacit and mute. I shall never understand people.
At home, Johanna greeted me with her cryptic smile, the one that makes her look like a rich man’s Mona Lisa, and the sisterly sort of kiss with which a wife tells you that she loves you; but. Scorning explanations, I swept off to my dressing-room, leaving instructions that I should be called at twenty minutes before luncheon.
‘Yes, dear,’ she said. She has a gift for words.