The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(9)

I had a nap and awoke much mollified and spent a useful afternoon with my ultra-violet machine and a grease crayon, mapping the passages of repaint (‘strengthening’ as we call it in the trade) on a gorgeous panel by – well, more or less by – the Allunno di Amico di Sandro. (God bless Berenson, I say.) Then I wrote a few paragraphs of my paper for Burlington Magazine in which I shall prove, once and for all, that the Tallard Madonna in the Ashmolean is by Giorgione after all, and despite that awful man Berenson.

Dinner was pork chops with the kidneys in and chips and beer. I always send Jock out for the beer in a jug and make him wear a cloth cap. It seems to taste better and he doesn’t mind a bit. They won’t serve the porter’s little girl, you see.

After dinner Mrs Spon arrived with lots of samples of gimp and bobbles and crétonnes for cushion covers and things and pink mosquito netting for the standing drapes round my bed. I had to be firm about the netting, I must admit it was rather lovely but I insisted that it should be blue-for-a-boy. I mean, I have my little ways but I’m not a deviate, for God’s sake, am I, I asked her.

She was already just a little cross when Martland arrived and loomed in the doorway like a pollution problem. Diffidently, for him, but definitely doomlike.

They admitted, grudgingly, that they knew each other by sight. Mrs Spon flounced over to the window. I know lots of men who can flounce but Mrs Spon is the last woman who can do it. There was a sticky sort of silence of the sort which I relish. Finally Martland whispered, ‘Perhaps you should ask the old doxy to leave’ in just too loud a whisper.

Mrs Spon rounded on him and Told Him Off. I had heard of her talents in that direction but had never before been privileged to hear her unlock the word bag. It was a literary and emotional feast: Martland withered visibly. There is no one like your gently nurtured triple-divorcee for really putting the verbal leather in. ‘Wart on the tax-payer’s arse,’ ‘traffic-warden’s catamite,’ and ‘poor man’s Colonel Wigg’ are just a few of the good things she served up but there was more – much more. She swept out at last, in a cloud of ‘Ragazza’ and lovely epithets. She was wearing a suede knickerbocker suit but you’d have sworn she twitched a twelve-foot train of brocade away from Martland as she passed him.

‘Golly,’ he said when she’d gone.

‘Yes,’ I said, happily.

‘Well. Well, look, Charlie, what I really came to say was how sick and sorry I am about all this.’

I gave him my cold look. The big, economy size.

‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘you’ve had a filthy rotten time and I think you’re owed an explanation. I want to put you in the picture – which will give you a bit of a whip-hand, I don’t mind telling you – and er ask your er help.’

‘Gor blimey,’ I thought.

‘Sit down,’ I said, frigidly. ‘I myself prefer to stand, for reasons which will occur to you. I shall certainly listen to your explanations and apologies; beyond that I can make no promises.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He fidgeted a little, like a man who is expecting to be offered a drink and thinks you’ve forgotten to do the honours. When he realized that it was definitely Temperance Night for him he resumed.

‘Do you know why Spinoza was shot this morning?’

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I said boredly, although a multiplicity of ideas about it had been running through my head all afternoon. Wrong ones.

‘It was meant for you, Charlie.’

My heart started rattling about irresponsibly in my rib cage. My armpits became cold and wet. I wanted to go to the lavatory.

I mean, electric batteries and so forth are one thing, within reason of course, but that someone actually means to kill you, forever, is a thought that the mind cannot accept, it wants to vomit it out; ordinary people just don’t have the mental or emotional clichés to deal with news like that.

‘How can you possibly be sure of that?’ I asked after a moment.

‘Well, to be perfectly frank, Maurice thought it was you he shot. It was certainly you he meant to shoot.’

‘Maurice?’ I said. ‘Maurice? You mean your Maurice? Whatever would he want to do that for?’

‘Well, I sort of told him to, really.’

I sat down after all.

Jock’s craggy form disengaged itself smoothly from the shadows just outside the door and came to rest behind my chair. He was breathing through his nose for once, making a plaintive, whistling noise on the exhaust stroke.

‘Did you ring, Sir?’

Jock really is marvellous. I mean, imagine saying that. What tact, what savoir faire, what a boost for the young master in time of stress. I felt so much better.

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘have you a pair of brass knuckles about you? I may ask you to hit Mr Martland in a moment or two.’

Jock didn’t actually answer, he knows a rhetorical question when he hears one. But I sensed him pat his hip pocket – ‘me bin’ he calls it – where six ounces of cunningly fashioned brass have lived a snug and smelly life since he was the youngest juvenile delinquent in Hoxton.

Martland was shaking his head vigorously, impatiently. ‘No need for that at all, none at all. Try and understand, Charlie.’

‘Try and make me understand,’ I said. Grim, sore-arsed.