The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(41)

The more I thought about this view of things the more sensible it became and the sweeter shone the sun on the unjust. I leaned back luxuriously into the rich-smelling leather of the Rolls – my Rolls! – and quietly whistled a happy stave or two.

Martland, surely, would never believe that Krampf’s infarct was natural; he would assume that I had murdered him as per invoice and had been devilish clever about it.

Only Johanna knew that I had burned the negative and if I dropped the merest hint to Martland that I might just have forgotten to do so he would never dare unleash his death dogs on me but would be forced to respect his word and protect me from all annoyances; such as, for instance, death.

I liked it; I liked it all, it fitted together, it made nonsense of my fears, I felt positively young again. For two pins, I’d have turned back and given Johanna a little farewell token of my esteem after all, that’s how young I felt. The lark was on the wing and flying strongly, while the snail was positively striding up its favourite thorn.

Admittedly, there was one fly trampling about in the ointment of my content: I was now the proud but shy owner of about half a million pounds’ worth of hot Goya – the hottest piece of property in the world. Despite what you read in the Sunday papers, America is not seething with mad millionaires panting to buy stolen masterpieces and gloat over them in their underground aviaries. As a matter of fact, the late Krampf had been the only one I knew of and I did not much want another like him. A superb spender, but hard on the nervous system.

Destroying the painting was out of the question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker’s moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never. Why, even the Woosters had a code, as we are told on the highest authority.

Probably the best thing was to take it back to England – it was, after all, as well hidden now as it ever could be – and get in touch with a specialist friend who knows how to do discreet deals with insurance companies.

You know, all those dreary pink Renoirs which are incessantly getting pinched in the South of France are either sold back to the insurers at a straight 20 per cent of the sum insured – the companies won’t pay a franc more, it’s a matter of professional ethics – or they are pinched at the express request of the owners and immediately destroyed. The French arriviste, you see, lives in such a continual agony of snobbism that he dares not put his Renoir, bought three years ago, into a public auction and so admit that he is short of a little change – still less dare he take the risk that it might fetch less than he has told all his awful friends it is worth. He would rather die; or, in practical terms, he would rather assassinate the painting and collect the nouveaux francs. In England the police tend to purse their lips and wag their fingers at insurance co’s who buy back stolen things from the thieves: they feel that this is not a way to discourage villainy – in fact the whole process is strictly against the law.

Nevertheless, if a certain young man, not unknown at Lloyd’s, murmurs in the proper ear that a bundle of currency posted to an accommodation address in Streatham will bring about a change of heart in certain thieves and cause them to panic and dump the swag in a left-luggage office – well, insurance co’s are only human you know (or didn’t you know?) and a thousand pounds is a great deal less than, say, five thousand ditto. The certain young man not unknown at Lloyd’s was also not unknown to me and although he didn’t like murmuring in that sort of ear more than once or twice a year he had, I knew, a heart of gold and owed me a trifling kindness. Moreover, he was terrified of Jock. Don’t think I’m recommending this particular caper, though: the police are professionals and we laymen are only gifted amateurs, at the best. If you must sin, find an obscure, unexplored branch of crime that the Yard hasn’t any experts in and work it gently, don’t milk it dry, and vary your modus operandi continually. They’ll get on to you in the end, of course, but if you’re not greedy you may have a few good years first.

As I was saying, before the above gnomic utterances, I was by now wholly reconciled to a Panglossian view of things: all was explicable, the tangled web made, after all, a comprehensible pattern when looked at in sunlight and also, after all, one Mortdecai was worth a whole barrelful of Martlands, Bluchers, Krampfs and other dullards. (‘One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive.’ J.S. Lefanu.)

To complete my skimpy breakfast, and to celebrate the victory of virtue over dullness, I opened a bottle of the twelve-year-old Scotch and was just raising it to my lips when I saw the powder-blue Buick. It was coming out of an arroyo ahead of us, coming fast, engine howling in a low gear, coming straight for our nearside. Our offside was barely a yard from a sheer drop of hundreds of feet – it was a fair cop. I’d had my life. Jock – I’ve told you how fast he could be when necessary – wrenched the wheel over to the left, stood on the brakes, snatched first gear before the Rolls stalled and was turning right as the Buick hit us. The Buick man had known nothing of the strength of a vintage Rolls Royce, nor of Jock’s fighting brain; our radiator gutted his car’s side with a ghastly shriek of metal and the Buick span like a top, ending up poised on the shoulder of the road, its rear end impossibly extended over the precipice. The driver, face contorted with who knows what emotion, was fighting frantically with the door handle, his features a mask of nasty blood. Jock got out, ponderously strolled over to him and stared, looked up and down the road, went to the front of the mangled Buick, found a handhold and heaved enormously. The Buick tilted, started to go very slowly: Jock had time to get to the window again and give the driver a friendly grin before the nose went up and slid out of sight, slowly still. The driver showed us all his teeth in a silent scream before he went; we heard the Buick bounce three times, amazingly loudly, but never a thread of the driver’s scream – those Buicks must be better soundproofed than you’d think. I believe, but I am not sure even now, that it was friendly Mr Braun – who was once again proving to me the statistical improbability of death in an aircraft accident.