The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(61)

There is, I believe, a very sophisticated cop-shop South of the Thames but I have never seen it except in the mind’s eye, which is where I should like to keep it. The only pub I know called The Bunch of Grapes is in Gracie Fields’ deathless aspidistra song. I believe that there was once a shop in the East End called Mycock’s Electrical but I know of no pig-abattoirs of that name.

The lavatory inspection-panel ruse for smuggling heroin was, indeed, once used but it has long been ‘blown’ or I would not have related it. It is almost as old-fashioned as using motor-car tyres, cameras from Kowloon, hollowed-out boomerangs from Bendigo (New South Wales), ‘pregnant’ ladies from Amsterdam, long-playing records pressed out of ganja resin, or even dusty carpets from Kashmir which need a little attention from a certain dry-cleaner in London’s dockland before they are delivered to the consignee. The same is true of other naughty techniques described: pray do not let them tempt you to embark upon a life of crime. You may be a hare but ‘Old Bill’ is a most capable tortoise.

I apologize to Air France: its hostesses are all excellent linguists. Many of them can even understand my French.





1 Mortdecai prepares to meet his Maker





Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone …





Maud





Yes, well, there it was. That was that. I’d had my life.

So I drank the last of the whisky, looked a loving last once more on the naked Duchess and shed perhaps – I forget – a tear of self-pity, that last of luxuries, before climbing stiffly to my feet. The heavy, friendly old Smith & Wesson pistol was loaded in all chambers with the murderous soft lead target ammunition. I pulled the hammer back a little, which allows the cylinder to spin. I span it, listening to the quick, fat chuckle of the ratchet.

Then I sat down again.

I had left it just that few minutes too late and there had been just too small a jolt of Scotch in the tail of the bottle. Had there been even one more fluid ounce, I could have gone roaring out of my smelly cavern like some old grizzly bear, but now sobriety had me by the throat. You see, I had begun to consider just where the bullets would smash into my well-nourished body; what bones would be shattered, what spillikins of the said bones would be sent splintering through which of my delicate organs, how long this mangling would last before generous Death brushed pain aside and passed his hand over my eyelids, closing them forever.

No, wait, sorry. Hang about a bit. It has just occurred to me that you might be a trifle puzzled as to why Charlie Mortdecai – I – should have been preparing for death in a smelly cavern, chaperoned only by a naked Duchess, a large revolver and an empty whisky-bottle. I realize that some might find these circumstances unusual, perhaps even bizarre.

This, then, is what happened before you came in. Nude readers begin here. There’s this chap Me, you see – the Hon. Charlie Mortdecai – I was actually christened Charlie – who is, or rather am, a nice, rich, cowardly, fun-loving art-dealer who dabbles in crime to take his mind off his haemorrhoids. Then there’s this fantastic painting by Goya of ‘The Duchess of Wellington’ who, at the time of being painted, had absent-mindedly forgotten to put her knickers back on. Or, indeed, anything else. Having so much respect for other people’s property that I sometimes feel bound to care for it myself, I had nicked the painting from the Prado, Madrid, and exported it personally to a millionaire art-lover in New Mexico. I found the art-lover freshly murdered, and his randy-eyed young widow casting about for a replacement. All went wrong, as all these things do, and, as my sense of fun started to fray at the cuffs, I shortened my lines of communication – as the generals used to say – and made tracks for England, home and beauty, in the order named.

All sorts of people were by that time disliking Mortdecai warmly, and in an almost-final hot pursuit I was obliged to kick in the head of my trusty thug Jock, who was about to die even more unpleasantly in the quicksands of Morecambe Bay, Lancashire. I – Mortdecai – holed up in a disused red-oxide mine on Warton Crag (still in Lancashire), found that my enemies had traced me thither, and realized that my life was over. I was in a pretty shabby mental and physical state by then and resolved to get as drunk as I could, then to come roaring out of my stinking lair and kill at least Martland, chief of my persecutors.

Right? Any questions? There I was, then, preparing to go out and meet the kind of messy death I had too often seen happen to other people. I couldn’t see myself in the r?le at all.

Ah, yes, but. What else? Where was your actual alternative?

I upturned the bottle and collected three more drops, or it may have been four.

‘Pull yourself together, Mortdecai,’ I told myself sternly. ‘Nothing in life became you like the leaving of it. It is a far, far better thing that you do now. You are ready and ripe for death. You’ll like it up there.’

‘Up?’ I thought. ‘Up there? Must you joke at a time like this?’

Then I looked again at the painted Duchess, her canvas propped against the wall of the mine-shaft, smiling like a whole choir of Mona Lisas, voluptuously sexless, erotic only on a level that I could never reach. Although God knows I have tried.

‘Oh, very well,’ I told her.

I crawled to the entrance of the little mine. There was no sound outside, no movement, but they were there, all right. There was nowhere else they would be.