The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(77)

We cannot all afford oysters and Guinness’s stout but I promise you that there are times when a little ￡20 jar of Beluga caviar will fill the gap admirably.

The next day, sure that Jock was in his pantry doing useful things and that Johanna was in the shower, I huddled on my new ‘clothes’ and was about to slink out of the flat unobserved. Johanna caught me in the very act of slinking and staggered about laughing like a little mad thing at the sight of my rainbow garb. She has one of those rippling, silvery laughs which are quite enchanting when they are directed at anyone but oneself.

‘Hush!’ I commanded. ‘If Jock sees me in this suit he will give in his notice. He has his pride, you see.’

‘But, Charlie, dearest,’ she murmured between one silvery ripple and another, ‘why are you dressed as an undertaker? And does the black, important box contain your embalming equipment?’

‘I see nothing to laugh at,’ I replied stiffly, ‘in the sight of a Briton true preparing to assassinate his Sovereign against his better judgment.’

‘I am sorry, Charlie,’ she said soberly. ‘I didn’t realize that you were in disguise.’

‘Well, I jolly well am,’ I said.

As I passed the kitchen there was a muffled, flatulent sound, too treble to be one of Jock’s.

‘Jock,’ I said sternly, ‘the canary is constipated again. I have no faith in the new vet. Pray telephone the Zoo and ask their advice.’

‘Right, Mr Charlie,’ he said – and then, sotto voce, he said something which sounded like, ‘Give him a look at your new suit.’

I walked – nay, slunk – for what seemed miles until I was well away from those parts of London where any friends of mine might live, then I hailed a taxi and directed it to the City, where there was only an outside chance that I might encounter my stockbroker or the chief of my Lloyds’ syndicate. In my pocket I had a map of the Royal Route which I had torn out of Jock’s newspaper, which is the kind of newspaper which Jock reads. (Fleet Street calls them ‘tit-and-bum rags’ but Jock is ever faithful to Shirley Temple; what he dearly loves, true-born Briton though he be, is those candid snapshots of junior royals taking an ‘arser’ from a horse in a puissance trial. Perhaps he sometimes also spots the stick of type in the corner which tells of 15,000,000 homeless in West Bengal. Perhaps. His social conscience is a couple of notches higher than the World Council of Churches, but that’s about it.) In my pocket, as I was saying before you interrupted me, I had a map of the Royal Route. My Times had not specified in the ‘Court Circular’ – and probably would not say until after the event – which kind of vehicle Her M. would be travelling in but, since this was a State Occasion (a Reception and Luncheon at the Cordwanglers’ Hall with foreign royals present), I was hoping that the Royal Party would be in one of the State Landaus – open tops, you see – rather than in one of those great, weighty Daimlers or Rolls-Royces which every amateur assassin knows to be bullet-proof.

My newspaper route-map showed that the Royal Progress was to pass briefly through a grotty little City street on its way to Cordwanglers’ Hall and it was to that very street that I directed my cab, and there that I had the cabbie decant me, over-tipping him just enough to give him the impression that I was not a native son of London, but not enough to make him remember me. Those of you who have ever been unlucky enough to be a secret agent or hired assassin will understand how my mind was working.

Up and down the grotty street I toddled, the instrument-case bumping cruelly against my thigh, but not a single BED AND BREAKFAST sign could I descry. What I did descry on my third toddle was a tall, narrow-shouldered, grubby building with the name of a firm of solicitors on the ground-floor windows and an assortment of dirty lace curtains in the windows of the upper floors. A skinny slattern in curlers slouched in the basement area, listlessly pushing dirt about with what had once been a broom.

‘Goot mornink!’ I said, raising my golfing-cap in a Continental sort of way and smirking amiably. She looked up at me from the ‘area’; her eyes were those of a long-retired whore who had never really enjoyed her work.

‘’E’s out,’ she said, dismissively.

‘I voz wonderink –’

‘Out,’ she repeated. The atmosphere was heavy with the scent of overdue hire-purchase payments.

‘I voz wonderink vedder you might haff a small room I could use in ze evenings …’

‘Yer what?’

‘Ya, to play wiz my instroment, you onderstand.’

‘Yer what?’ I realized that, from her position down in the ‘area’, she could not see my saxophone-case and might have misconstrued me a bit. I raised the case and waggled it.

‘My vife,’ I explained, ‘doz not vish me to play wiz it at home any more. It makes her ongry wiz me.’

‘ ’Ungry?’

‘Ya,’ I said, inspired, ‘hongry. Then she eat too much, you understand, and become fat an dis spoil our loff-life pecoss I cannot stand fat vomen.’ I eyed her with undisguised admiration; she smoothed the ratty house-coat over her skinniness.

Ten minutes later I was the tenant of a second-floor room overlooking the street, having paid a modest rental one month in advance and having agreed that I should only practise my instrument during those hours when the solicitor downstairs was not practising law, that I should not entertain friends in the room and that I should not use the bathroom. There was a wash-hand basin in the room, you see, to receive any peremptory calls of nature.