The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(79)

I travelled by tube – subway? – to the nearest station to my City lodgings and entered the Public Lavatory. (It was early in the day, you see, the Stock Exchange was busy and Parliament was in session so there was little danger of being accosted.) I changed into the suit, the shoes, the cap.

A few minutes later; well, there I was at the window, sliding the telescopic sight onto the Mannlicher, my fingers twitching with trepidation about the abominable act I was about to perform – twitching, too, with fury and revulsion at the way my skinny landlady had unequivocally brushed herself against me on the stairs and suggested that I might join her for ‘a glass of summink’ in her boudoir.

‘Oftervords, oftervords,’ I had mumbled, trying to muster a leer although well knowing – nay, hoping – that there would be no oftervords.

So there I was, the lovely Spanish mahogany stock of the rifle becoming more and more slippery with sweat, no matter how often I wiped my guilty hands on the trouser-legs of the hated suit. My wristlet-watch, although a creation of Patek Philippe himself, ticked ever more slowly, as though it had been dipped in the very best butter.

At last there was to be heard a distant sound of hooraying, then a sort of galumphing noise which betokened the advent of horse-drawn carriages full of Royals and their Head of State guests. I wiped the hands once more, allowed the rifle-muzzle to protrude a further inch or two (for I could descry no security-idiots on the rooftops across the street) and cuddled the butt to my shoulder, telescopic eye-piece to watery eye. Here they came – in the bloody State Landau, sure enough – all of them doing that wonderful, inimitable Royal wave of the hand which only Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother can do properly. Obviously, I couldn’t do it: the murder, I mean, not the wave. I must have been mad to have thought that I could. (When St Peter, at the Pearly Gates, gives me that form to fill in, the only claim I shall be able to make in mitigation is that I never shot at a sitter in my life.) (Naturally, I don’t count rats, carrion-crows, ex-presidents of Uganda and that sort of thing.)

Nevertheless, my cowardly, regicide right hand seemed to have a life of its own; it drew back the bolt of the Mannlicher and shoved it forward to usher a cartridge into the breech. It jammed. The bolt, I mean – or rather the cartridge. I wrenched the bolt back fiercely until the distorted cartridge sprang free and whirred past my ear to strike a tasteful colour-print of Van Gogh’s ‘Two Pansies Sharing a Pot’. I crammed the bolt forward again and it jammed again. The cavalcade was about to pass the point where my field-of-fire would be ineffective. I cursed Jock with love and respect (I had checked those cartridges that very morning – who else could have nobbled them?) but, with thoughts of survival in my mind, wrestled with the bolt-action so that I could loose off just one shot to show that I had tried. It was just as I had cleared the third cartridge and clunked in a fresh clip that I found out why there had been no security-idiots lumbering about on the rooftops across the street. It was because they were kicking in the door of my squalid room. Just behind me.

Now there are two ways of kicking in doors. The first, which I was taught by a gentleman in Philadelphia, is quick, neat and almost soundless. These chaps used the other method. Had I been a dedicated villain I could have shot them into bite-sized helpings before they delivered the third kick, but my heart was not in it. When they at length tumbled in through the wreckage of the door I lifted them to their great feet and dusted them off courteously. The door had not been locked but I did not tell them this, I didn’t want to spoil their day. Each of them arrested me again and again, urging me to say things which might be used in evidence against me and sticking evidence-tabs on everything in sight, while the skinny landlady gibbered and squawked behind them, averring that she had suspected all along that I was not a true-born Englishman.

The copper’s voices were fierce, grave and proud. This was a Tower of London job, you see; your true regicide is not submitted to the squalor of Wormwood Scrubs where he might have to rub shoulders with muggers, wife-bashers, child-rapists and common property-developers. I was special. (My only regret, as they snucked the handcuffs about my wrists, was that I had not made it perfectly clear to Jock that the little jars of partridge-breasts in jelly are quite useless without fresh brown bread and butter.) The coppers scarcely hit me at all but they searched me thoroughly for incriminating documents such as five-pound notes, gold cigarette-cases and so forth but all they found was the receipted bill for the suit I was wearing. I hope they did not give GENTS’ WARDROBES PURCHASED a bad time.

The frisking was disgracefully inefficient – I had to remind them about the small of my back, where evil men often tape a ‘shiv’ or ground-down razor. While I giggled three tall men loomed in the doorway, brushing aside the debris with fastidious feet. No common British coppers, these, the very feet told one that. They were in fact Colonel Blucher and a brace of his myrmidons. Blucher brandished a plastic triptych bespattered with the marks of important rubber stamps. The coppers stopped arresting me and started calling Blucher ‘Sir’. Someone told the landlady to shut up, for which relief much thanks, and there was a sort of tableau. Then Blucher thanked the bobbies civilly but in the flat sort of voice which means ‘f*ck off’.

I do not know who reimbursed the landlady for her burst door and shattered dreams but it was not I. As we left she made a gesture which she should not have known how to make, for she was clearly not a showjumper.