The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(96)

After he had signed receipts and things and had shrugged off his subordinates he carried me off to the cop-shop canteen, where he regaled me with delectable tea and the finest and crispest ham-rolls I have ever sunk tooth into.

‘Well,’ I said, when the crust-munching noises had died down, ‘are you going to tell me or not?’

‘Teeth and toenails,’ he answered cryptically.

‘Eh?’

‘Aye. No blame to you for not noticing, but those twits out there are supposed to have been taught to use their eyes.’

I kept my mouth shut. I, too, had been taught things of that kind long ago, but there was no profit in telling him the story of my life and I hoped, in any case, to hear him spell out his thoughts as to an innocent bystander, for there is no more rewarding experience than to listen to a man who is really good at his job. This man was very good.

‘First,’ he said, licking a trace of mustard from a capable thumb, ‘when did you last see a genuine old-fashioned foot-tramp in England?’

‘Why, now I come to think of it, not for a hell of a long time. Used to be part of the landscape, didn’t they, but I can’t say that I –’

‘Right. I said foot-tramp to rule out Romanies and didicoys and such. I don’t reckon there’s six real tramps walking the roads of England today and there haven’t been since, oh, about 1960. The casual-wards are all closed down, so are the pay-flops; and the Rowton Houses are all turning into Commercial Hotels. They say there’s a few old stagers still trudging Wild Wales, but that’s it.

‘Moreover, your real old tramp used to have a regular beat of about two hundred miles, so he’d pass through any given “manor” maybe once in a good summer and three times in winter. Even those morons out there who call themselves detectives would certainly know any walking-gent who went through the manor regular.’

‘Meths-drinker?’ I asked.

‘No. None of the signs. And meths-drinkers haven’t the strength to walk any distance. And they usually have a flat half-bottle of the rubbish taped to the small of their back in case they get nicked. And they don’t eat. Our man liked his food – if you can call it food.’

‘So?’

‘So, second,’ he said, examining his forefinger for any lingering mustard, ‘you were dead right when you worried that he’d not got himself a set of dining-snappers off the National Health. In fact, as a glance at his gums and canines would have told any real policeman, he had once owned a costly set of bridgework – not your National Health sort – and had only parted with them a few months ago. Say, about the time he took his last bath.’

‘And third?’ I prompted.

‘Third,’ he said, holding up his middle finger in a gesture which would be considered vulgar in Italy, ‘third, no scissors.’

‘No scissors,’ I repeated in an intelligent sort of voice.

‘No scissors. In me early days I’ve looked over the belongings of many a tramp found dead in a ditch. Some of them had pictures of the lass that drove them onto the road, some of them had rosaries, some had a little bag of golden sovereigns and I remember one that had a New Testament in Greek. But the one thing that they all had was a good, strong pair of scissors. You wouldn’t last long walking the road if you couldn’t cut your toenails. A tramp’s toenails are his bread and butter, you might say. Our man here didn’t even have a strong sharp knife, did he? No; not a tramp, definitely.’

I made the sort of admiring noises you used to make when your geometry-master triumphantly said ‘QED’.

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he went on, ‘that I regret saying that bit about him not being a tramp in front of the Sergeant and the DC. But I know that you can be relied on to keep your mouth shut, sir’ – I jumped a little at the ‘sir’ – ‘because obviously neither of us wants idiots like them wondering why someone would be wanting to pass himself off as a tramp in this particular part of the country.’ He looked narrowly at me as he said that last bit: I did my best to look inscrutable, hoping to give the impression that I well knew the special fact about ‘this particular part of the country’ and that I might well have, tucked into my left boot, a very special kind of identity-credential too grand to be shown to common coppers.

‘Funny about that nice new tenner he had on him,’ mused the Inspector. ‘Looked to be fresh from the mint, didn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Not even folded, was it?’

‘No.’

‘What was the number on it again, did you happen to notice?’

‘Yes,’ I said absently – stupidly – ‘JZ9833672, wasn’t it?’

‘Ah, yes, that was it. Funny, that.’

‘How d’you mean, “funny”?’ I asked. ‘Funny that I should remember it? I have an eidetic memory for numbers, can’t help it. Born with it.’ He did not take the trouble to check my statement – he was good at his job, he knew I was lying.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I meant funny that it’s from the same series as a large number of perfectly genuine tenners that the London lads reckon have come into the country not a month ago. From Singapore or one of those places. You must admit that’s funny.’

‘Hilarious,’ I said.