The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(174)

Our copy of the newspaper is delivered at six o’clock but, evidently, other people get theirs earlier, for the telephone calls started again with redoubled vigour at half-past four. Set out in rough order they comprised:

One learned Rector of my acquaintance who wished, sadly and probably sensibly, that we had tried the Church’s resources first, instead of imperilling our souls by flirting with the Opposition.

One Christian Scientist – I thought they had all died out – who explained that rape was all in the mind and merely a manifestation of Mortal Error. She was still talking when I hung up on her, but I don’t suppose she noticed.

Three separate and distinct Jehovah’s Witnesses who told me that Armageddon was scheduled for 1975 and that there would be no place for me among the 50,000 survivors unless I did something about the state of my soul pretty smartly. I didn’t try to explain that the thought of surviving in a world populated only by Witnesses horrified me: I just gave them each a telephone number of one boring friend or another who would, I assured them, relish a visit from one of their sect.

Two respectable acquaintances who each had found that they had invited us to dinner on the wrong day and would ring us back in due course.

Three ditto who had accepted invitations from us but now found they had previous – or more likely subsequent – engagements.

One engaging re-incarnation buff who had been the Great Beast of Revelation the last time around.

One quite frantic chap who said I had got it all wrong about the Devil: ‘She’s a coloured person,’ he explained.

Several alleged and assorted witches, some of whom sneered and some of whom offered alibis.

One drunken Irishman who asked for precise directions to my house so that he could call and bash my bloody brains in.

One chap called Smith who said that he was going to church to pray for my soul but with no very lively expectation of success.

One prominent member of the Pressure Group for the Reform of the Cruelty to Animals Law, who proposed to take the poodle away from me and find it a good home. (I told her that I, too, was keen on cruelty to animals but that the poodle was a stuffed one, alas, having died last year in a nameless fashion.)

Clearly, the Jersey Evening Post must have done me proud and, indeed, when my copy at last arrived, so it proved. Bannered and splashed across the front page was all the Mortdecai that was fit to print. The photograph sent Johanna and Jock lurching and staggering across the floor in ribald mirth: senile, scholarly old Mortdecai, be-poodled and be-piped, beamed pottily out at one in the most diverting way. Miss H. Glossop, the young lady reportress, had evidently done her homework, for her facts were clear and well-researched. Erudite, unworldly old Mortdecai, it appeared, anxious to help friends in distress, had fought fire with fire to such effect that the very celebrant of the rites had dropped dead – to everyone’s regret – at the climax of the performance. ‘What,’ the story implied, ‘would the harvest be for the guilty target, when even the innocent gunner, so to speak, couldn’t take the recoil?’ Miss Glossop went on in an exceedingly well-informed way to recount the marvellous powers attributed to the Mass of S. Sécaire, and to pity the witch who pitted his paltry powers against it. No literate diabolist could possibly have missed the point. Moreover, apart from a slight tendency to freely split infinitives, her style evidently derived from the best models: not a single ‘subsequently transpired’ marred her pellucid prose. I was well pleased. Indeed, I got up in time for dinner and made a few telephone calls myself. Sam was out – no one knew where – but George grudgingly admitted that the ploy seemed to be going well. Solly, his mouth full (solicitors dine much earlier than barristers), admitted that my image might well be a little better for the publicity, and let me know that one or two of the charges had been dropped and only four or five fresh ones had been thought of.

I began to feel positively chipper. Apart from the prospect of a few score years in prison the horizon was pretty clear. Peals of laughter wafted through from the kitchen, where Jock, I suppose, was showing my photograph to his dominoes-friend and the cook. I beamed indulgently.

Dinner was announced.

I need hardly say that I am not one of those whose minds dwell continually on foodstuffs: but when I do, once in a while, turn my mind in that direction it is with a certain single-mindedness; particularly when, as in this case, the grocery under advisement proves to be a guinea-fowl, that triumph of the poulterer’s art. This particular feathered friend was an uncommonly well-poultered example: it must have led a beautiful and sheltered life. Hand-in-hand tripped a bottle of Barolo, singing wistful lays of the gravel slopes of the Piedmont. Seldom have I spent a happier and more innocent hour but, as the Master himself tells us, it is at times like these that Fate creeps out of a dark alley, fingering a stuffed eel-skin destined for the back of one’s neck.

I threw the end of my Romeo y Julieta into the embers of the fire and cast a sort of husbandly look at Johanna. She raised an eyebrow shaped like a seagull’s wing. I winked. The telephone rang.

It was the Centenier, He thought I might like to know that there had been another rape. The wife of the tomato grower. Satanic trapping as before but with an addition: having knocked her unconscious with the same gentle punch, he had scribbled the word ‘secretary’ in greasepaint in a semi-circle on her bare belly, well below the navel.

‘Have you read the paper tonight?’ I asked.