The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(95)

‘Sweet, cuddlesome dreams, my own dearest little fluffy-puss,’ I said into the receiver as I replaced it in a dignified fashion, before turning upon the fellow and raising a brace of icy eyebrows. (I yield to none when it comes to eyebrow-raising; I was taught by my father himself, who could have eyebrow-raised for Great Britain had he not been so haughty.) The Sergeant cringed a little, as I had been cringing under the lash of Blucher’s ice-maiden voice. This cringing of his gave me time to wonder what kind of pressure Blucher could have applied – and to whom – and what I was supposed to do – or be.

The necessary, hasty trip to the mortuary over, we all pitched up at the cop-shop of the county town – I cannot remember its name but I shall always think of it as Heckmondwyke – where I was given great mugs of tea and met an Inspector of Detectives who positively bulged with intelligence and well-feigned friendliness. He asked me only the most natural and obvious questions then told me courteously that a room was booked for me at the cleaner of the two local hostelries and that the Detective Sergeant would take me there. Oh yes, and would pick me up in the morning, so that we could foregather at the morgue.

‘Didn’t seem awfully interested, did he?’ I said nonchalantly as the Sergeant decanted me in front of what I suppose I must call the hotel.

‘Well, only an old tramp,’ said the Sergeant.

‘Ah,’ I said.

Dinner was ‘off’, of course, for it was by now quite eight o’clock, but an embittered crone, after I had bribed her richly, made me a bowl of soup and something called am-an-eggs. The soup was not good but she had at least taken the packet off before adding the warm water. I prefer not to discuss the am-an-eggs.

It would be idle to pretend that I slept well.

Well, there we were next morning, all well-washed, shaven, aftershave fragrant; costly our habits as our purse could buy. (Indeed, rather costlier in the case of the Detective Constable: policemen in expensive suits worry me.) It was shaming to look at the dirty old corpse on the mortuary slab. Refrigeration had only a little abated the richness of his bodily odours. His mouth gaped open in a derisive way; the teeth in his mouth were few – and few of them could have met. The Inspector took his time looking at the teeth.

‘Even a tramp,’ I said crossly, from my guilty heart and from between well-dentifriced ivory-castles, ‘even a tramp could have got himself a set of gnashers from the National Health. I mean, dammit.’

‘That’s right,’ said the Inspector as he rose from peering into the carrion old mouth.

We trooped into the room where the tramp’s pitiful clothes and other gear were laid out on a trestle-table, together with the prescribed three copies of the list of these possessions. Our nostrils were assailed with the cloying horror of a lavender-flavoured aerosol ‘air-freshener’ and the Inspector snarled at the uniformed bloke in charge.

‘I might have wanted to smell these things,’ is what he snarled.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Anything that turns you on …’ murmured the Detective Constable by the door. The Inspector pretended not to have heard – help is hard to come by these days and, in any case, he had noticed the Detective Sergeant’s deadly glance at the DC: the glance which says that certain DC’s are going to find themselves lumbered with a nasty little bit of extra duty tomorrow.

The objects laid out on the trestle-table were not a suitable sight for the squeamish. In the matter of underclothes the deceased’s policy seemed to have been ‘live and let live’, not to mention ‘increase and multiply’. There were several layers of these intimate garments and its was apparent that the local police had not found a volunteer to separate them. The Inspector braced himself and went about the task himself: he was a man of iron. Then he checked, against the list, the pitiful, trumpery possessions from the corpse’s pockets and haversack. He checked them as minutely as a prosecuting attorney might scan President Nixon’s Christmas-present list.

There were ancient, nameless scraps of what might once have been food. There was a retired baked-beans tin with two holes in the edges to take a loop of wire; the inside was caked with tea, the outside with soot. There was a twist of plug-tobacco engraved with tooth-marks: whether by man or beast it would be hard to say. There was a cheap, blunt, celluloid-handled penknife of the sort which is made to sell. To schoolboys. Something stirred in my mind. There was a piece of soap, gnarled and grime-fissured. A tin box containing a dozen red-top matches and half an inch of candle. A coloured photograph from a ‘girlie’ magazine – a ‘beaver-shot’ as they call it, much creased and be-thumbed. An onion, the sweating heel of a piece of cheese and some cold fried potatoes, neatly packed in one of those foil-lined cartons they use in Chinese take-away restaurants. Grubby twists of paper containing sugar, tea, salt … ah, well, you know the sort of thing. Or perhaps you don’t; lucky you.

Oh yes, and there was a nice, clean ￡10 note.

The Inspector at last rose from his absurdly detailed inspection of the chattels, blew his nose and shook himself like a dog.

‘Not a tramp,’ he said. His voice was flat; he was not accusing anyone.

‘Not?’ I asked after a pause.

‘But …’ said the Sergeant after a longer pause.

‘Sir!’ huffed the DC.

‘Use your eyes, lad,’ said the Inspector. ‘The facts are as plain as the nose on your face.’ The DC, being well-gifted in the nose-department, fell silent. This was the point at which I began to take the Inspector seriously.