The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(37)
‘How apt,’ I murmured, ‘in the circumstances.’
She didn’t get it.
As the Countess had predicted, I was just in time for dinner. Changed and bathed, I sat down feeling more like the C. Mortdecai we know and love but I admit to having felt a little chary, a little coy, about meeting the old lady’s eye. As it happened, she avoided catching mine; she was a dedicated food eater, it was a pleasure to sit in front of her.
‘Tell me,’ I said to Johanna as the second course appeared, ‘where is your husband?’
‘He is in his bedroom. Next to the little dressing room where I, ah, received you.’
I stared at her in panic – no sensate human being could have slept through the zoo-like racket of our coupling. Seeing my consternation she laughed merrily.
‘Please do not worry about it. He did not hear a thing, he has been dead several hours.’
I don’t really remember what we had for dinner. I’m sure it was delicious but I seemed to have difficulty swallowing and I kept on dropping knives, forks and things. ‘Quaking’ is the only word for what I was doing. All I remember is the old Countess opposite me, cramming the groceries into her frail body like one who provisions a yacht for a long voyage. ‘Cur quis non prandeat hoc est?’ seemed to be her attitude.
We had reached the port and walnuts stage before I recovered enough aplomb to venture another question.
‘Oh yes,’ Johanna replied indifferently, ‘it will have been his heart, I suppose. The doctor lives thirty miles away and is drunk; he will come in the morning. Why do you eat so little? You should take more exercise. I will lend you a mare in the morning, a gallop will do you good.’
I became scarlet and silent.
The old lady rang a silver bell which stood by her place and a whey-faced priest stole in and said a long Latin grace to which both the women listened with bent heads. Then the Countess rose and made her way with fragile dignity to the door, where she let out a fart of such frightening power and timbre that I feared she had done herself a mischief. The priest sat down at the end of the table and began gobbling nuts and guzzling wine as though his life depended on it. Johanna sat smiling dreamily into space, presumably envisaging a blissfully Krampf-free future. I certainly hoped she was not envisaging any bliss which would involve my participation in the near future: all I wanted was some Scotch and a big fat sleeping pill.
It was not to be. Johanna took me by the hand and led me off to see the corpse, much as one might be taken to see the ornamental waterfowl in an English house. Krampf lay naked and nasty and very dead indeed, displaying all the signs of a massive coronary occlusion, as the thriller writers say. (There are no outward signs of death by massive coronary occlusion.) On the carpet beside his bed lay a little silver box which I remembered; it always held his heart pills. Krampf had gone to join Hockbottle: dicky tickers, both of them. To name but a few.
His death solved a few problems and created a few more. There was something about the situation which I could not, at that stage of the evening, quite define, but I knew that the word ‘trouble’ figured in it somewhere. Feeling sure that Johanna would not mind, I drew back the sheet which covered him: there was no mark of violence on his lardy body. She came and stood on the other side of the bed and we looked down at him dispassionately. I had lost a rich customer; she had lost a rich husband; there was little quantitative difference between our sorrows and the qualitative difference was that she, presumably, stood to gain a lot of money and I stood to lose some. Had Krampf been alive he would have felt like Jesus Christ between the two thieves, and indeed, death had lent him a certain spirituality, a certain waxy saintliness.
‘He was a dirty ape,’ she said at last. ‘Also base and greedy.’
‘I am all those things,’ I answered quietly, ‘yet I do not think I am like Krampf was.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He was mean in a shabby, tight-fisted way. I do not think you are mean like that, or at all. Why should rich men be mean?’
‘I think it is because they would like to stay rich.’
She thought about that and didn’t like it.
‘No,’ she said again. ‘His greed was not of that sort. It was other people’s lives he was greedy for: he collected his fellow men like postage stamps. He did not really want the stolen picture which you have in the cover of the Rolls Royce: it was you he was buying. You would never have got free from him after this deal. You would have been kissing his pimply behind for the rest of your life.’
This upset me very much. First, even Krampf could not have known – should not have known – just where the Goya was supposed to be hidden; second, here was yet another person apparently manipulating me instead of vice versa; third, this was a woman, for God’s sake, deep into the conspiracy and bubbling over with dangerous facts. Krampf had always been rash but he knew the basic rules of villainy. How on earth had he sunk to the point of telling things to a woman?
The whole complexion of Krampf’s death changed; before, it had been an extreme awkwardness, now it was a peril. With all this dangerous knowledge surging about so freely there were dozens of motives for killing him when previously there had only been one: Martland’s.
Moreover, I had decided only that morning not to carry out my part of the contract I had made with Martland for the terminating of Krampf. I have no patience with the absurd respect in which human life is held these days – indeed, our chief trouble is that there is far too much human life around – but as I grow older I find myself less and less keen on actually topping people myself. Particularly when they happen to be my best customers. Nevertheless, I should probably have kept faith with Martland as per contract had it not occurred to me that morning that I was already on the butcher’s bill myself and that once I had killed Krampf I would be there redoubled, in spades, for a variety of reasons which you can surely work out for yourself.