The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(90)

The Princess





The Theory Morning went well; when it came to my turn I was able to do a pretty convincing imitation of a Levantine, for I had begged a clove of garlic from the kitchen; the Instructress fell back in disorder when I came bellying up to her, whining and waving my hands and gurking out great poisonous gusts of that prince of vegetables.

My pretty table-mate at luncheon also reeled back aghast but I had saved a snippet of the garlic against this very contingency and she chewed it obediently. ‘Why,’ she cried a moment later, ‘I can’t smell you at all any more!’ I enquired courteously after her bruise and learnt that it was still quite drettful and that she had meant to wub arnica into it but couldn’t quite weach it herself. We looked at each other speculatively.

This did not prevent her, later that afternoon, from doing her best to smarten me up painfully during the ‘Seek and Destroy’ exercise in the extensive shrubbery and plantation: indeed, she playfully planted, from quite twenty feet away, a graphite bullet squarely into the rolled-up pair of woollen socks which I had prudently placed where a cricketer keeps his box.

‘You shall pay for this,’ I muttered, gazing at the scarlet stain with which the crotch of my combat-trousers was splashed. (I was on the White side of this particular ploy or Kriegspiel, you see, while she was Red and our bullets were appropriately tinted.) I dutifully reported myself dead to the nearest Umpire, who tittered, sprayed an aerosol detergent on my red badge of honour and sent me back into the fray blushing. Craftily, I slithered across the lawn to the ditch or ha-ha, wormed along it until I was past the shrubbery, slithered out again and took up my position in a small, unkempt patch of scrub on the fringe of the plantation. (I was taught, long ago, always to choose the smallest piece of cover which will hold you; if you are behind the most barely adequate of the hummocks or bushes you will be the last to be rushed and may well be able to rake the other chaps with flank-fire while they are rushing the bigger ones. I don’t know what they teach soldiers in these days of neutron-bombs. Prayer, perhaps.)

I had chosen my spot well; not a single sinner passed within range for the best part of an hour and I almost think I was beginning to doze off, lulled by the fragrance of myrtle, pine-needles and many another pleasing pong such as botanists relish on a warm afternoon. I was aroused from my musings by the faintest of scraping sounds from, of all places, the direction of ha-ha. ‘Har har!’ I thought, ‘Gotcher!’ for I was confident that this scraping sound was from my nubile friend; confident, too, that she would either surrender and offer to show me her bruise or, failing that, give me a sight of her on the skyline so that I could match up the bruise with another.

Nothing of the sort. The student who emerged from the ha-ha was small and skinny and, against all the rules, not wearing the College combat dress. What she was wearing was a sort of hooded track-suit of dull sky-blue – rather like the old French Army field-colour – but striped and slashed diagonally with dark green, as was her face. But I am no milliner; I simply shot her in the chest.

It was a lovely shot. Have you ever swung to a really fast pheasant and known, even as you pulled the trigger, that you could not possibly have missed, that the bird will drop tidily, quite dead, so close to your feet that your dog will have nothing to do but thump his tail approvingly? No? Oh. Well then, have you ever, at the poker-table, drawn a card to a 7, 8, 9, 10 straight with the absolute certainty that the card will be a 6 or a knave? No? Really not? Then, clearly, you are a golfer and will know the feeling that golfers never tire of describing: the feeling just as you finish your swing that this is a really meaty one which will send your ball right onto the green and make you wish that you weren’t just playing for a lousy fiver.

This was, as I say, a lovely shot at that distance; it hit the girl on the central vertical axis, exactly half-way between the navel and the clavicle. Had it been a real bullet it would have collected a goodly chunk of her sternum and shredded it through the aorta, not killing her quite instantly but giving her perhaps a second and a half in which to regret that she had not chosen some other career.

Her reactions were slow, or perhaps she was simply a dullard; she checked in her stride and looked down stupidly at the ‘wound’, touched the splash of white powder in a puzzled sort of way, raised her fingers to her lips and tasted them. I raised my head from behind the hummock and cheerily told her that she was dead. She shot at me, which was against the rules. I wasted no time in protesting, for her bullet struck a stone in the hummock and screamed away en ricochet – no graphite bullet that. ‘Bitch!’ I thought angrily and squeezed off a couple of rounds at her camouflaged face – this, too was against the rules. One of them must have connected for she screamed and clutched at her eyes. The odd thing was that she was screaming in no European language that I had ever heard and the screams were delivered in a round tenor voice. A man’s voice.

As I stood up a shot came from another direction and I felt a strong snatch at the waist of my combat-blouse: another camouflaged Oriental was emerging from the ha-ha. I knew I was down to the last round in the clip – the solid, cupro-nickel coated round – but I have always set my personal safety before that of people who are trying to kill me. I shot him in the head. He died uncomplainingly, passing no remarks.

A third man clambered out of the ditch, similarly camouflaged. This was a bad thing, because my pistol was empty and the spare clip was filled with graphite only. As I scrabbled in my pocket a genteel sort of sound, like a bank manager’s fingers drumming on his desk-top, was to be heard from the plantation behind me. The man rose to his full height, stared down at his chest as puzzledly as the first chap had stared, then dropped dead. I swung around, still trying to drag the clip from my pocket.