The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(53)

This part of Lancashire contains some of the best bird-watching terrain in England: sea and shore birds in their millions haunt the vast salt-marshes and tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, and the reeds of Leighton Moss – an RSPB sanctuary – are alive with duck, swans, gulls and even the bittern.

I gave Dino three hundred pounds and he bought me a second-hand dark-green Mini, registered in his name. I plastered on a few stickers – SAVE LEVENS HALL, VOTE CONSERVATIVE, VISIT STEAM-TOWN – and dumped a Karri-Kot in the back seat: an inspired piece of camouflage, you must admit. We contrived to get a pair of tinted contact lenses for Jock, changing his startling blue eyes to a dirty brown. He liked them very much, called them ‘me shades’.

Meanwhile, since Carnforth is on STD now, it was safe to dial a number of guarded calls to London, where various naughty friends, in exchange for a lot of money, set to work creating new identities for Jock and me, so that we could get to Australia and start a new life amongst the Sheilas and Cobbers. New identities are very expensive and take a long time, but the process of obtaining them is so much easier now that there are all these drugs about. You simply find a chap who’s on the big H-for-heroin and not long for this world, preferably a chap with at least some points of resemblance to you. You take him under your wing – or rather your naughty friends do – lodge him, supply him with H and feed him whenever he can gag anything down. You get his National Insurance Card paid up to date, buy him a passport, open a Post Office Savings Account in his name, pass the driving test for him and fix him up with an imaginary job at a real place. (The ‘employer’ gets his wages back in cash, doubled.) Then you pay a very expensive craftsman to substitute your photograph in the new passport and you’re a new man.

(The drug addict, of course, now becomes a bit superfluous: you can have him knocked off professionally but that’s an extra, and awfully expensive nowadays. The best and cheapest course is to deprive him of his medicine for three days or so until he’s quite beside himself, then leave him in a busy public lavatory – Piccadilly Underground is much favoured in the trade – with a syringe containing a heavy overdose, and let Nature take its kindly course. The coroner will scarcely glance at him: he’s probably better off where he is; why, he might have lingered on for years, etc.)

In short, all seemed well except that William Hickey or one of those columnists had once or twice dropped delicate hints that certain People in High Places had been receiving certain photographs, which might or might not have referred to the Hockbottle art work. If so, I couldn’t really see who could be doing it – surely not Johanna? One of Hockbottle’s horrid friends? Martland? I didn’t let it worry me.

Last night, when I walked into the bar of Dino’s hotel, full of fresh air and nursing a splendid appetite, I would have told anyone that things were going uncommonly well. I had spent the afternoon on the Moss and had been fortunate enough to have had a pair of Bearded Tits in my field-glasses for several minutes – and if you think there’s no such bird you can jolly well look it up in the nearest bird book. That was last night, only.





Last night when I walked into the bar




The barman should have smiled and said, ‘Evening, Mr Jackson, what do you fancy?’ I mean, that’s what he’d said to me every evening for weeks.

Instead he gave me a hostile stare and said, ‘Well, Paddy, usual I suppose?’ I was completely taken aback.

‘Come on,’ said the barman disagreeably, ‘make your mind up. There’s other people want serving, you know.’

Two strangers at the end of the bar studied me casually in the mirror behind the display bottle. I twigged.

‘Arl roight arl roight,’ I growled thickly, ‘av coorse Oi’ll have me usual, ye cross-grained little sod.’

He pushed a double Jameson’s Irish whisky across the bar at me.

‘And watch your language,’ he said, ‘or you can get out.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said and tossed the whisky back messily. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, belched and lurched out. It is a good thing that a serious ornithologist’s field clothes are more or less the same as an Irish navvy’s drinking kit. I fled upstairs and found Jock sitting on the bed, reading the Beano.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘they’re on to us.’

We had kept in a state of readiness for any emergency so we were out of the hotel by the kitchen entrance some ninety seconds after I had left the bar, heading for the station yard where I had parked the Mini. I started the engine and backed out of the slot; I was quite calm, there was no reason for them to have suspected me.

Then I cursed, stalling the engine, paralysed with dismay.

‘Smatter, Mr Charlie, forgotten something?’

‘No, Jock. Remembered something.’

I had remembered that I had not paid for my whisky – and that the barman had not asked me to do so. Drunken Irish navvies hardly ever have charge accounts at respectable provincial hotels.

I got the engine started again, jammed the gears cruelly into mesh and swung out of the yard into the street. A man standing at the corner turned and raced back towards the hotel. I prayed that their car was pointing in the wrong direction.

I rammed the unprotesting little Mini out of town to the north on the Millhead Road; just before the second railway bridge I doused the lights and whisked it off to the left, towards Hagg House and the marsh. The road dwindled to a footpath and then to a wet track; we squashed barbed wire, nosed our way down banks, half-lifted the Mini across the impossibly soft parts, cursed and prayed and listened for the sounds of pursuit. To our left some three-headed spawn of Cerberus started to yelp and yap dementedly. We continued west, hating the dog with a deep, rich hatred, and found the River Keer by pitching into it. To be exact, the Mini had pitched down its bank and come to rest, nose downward, in the squishy sand beside the channel, for the tide was far out. I grabbed the almost empty suitcase, Jock grabbed the knapsack and we scrambled into the stream, gasping with shock as the cold water reached groin level. At the far side we stopped before scaling the bank and showing ourselves on the skyline; half a mile behind us an engine raced in a low gear; two cones of light from headlamps waved about in the sky, then suddenly went out.