The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  ‘Going back to the Bucks. alleged Constabulary,’ he said, ‘despite my previous remarks I should point out that, although I have nothing that you could call hegemony over that, er, admirable body of men, it does just so happen that my brother-in-law is the Superintendent at Prince’s Risborough. Married to my sister,’ he explained.

  ‘How nice,’ I said. He gave me an odd look.

  ‘She is a Primitive Baptist; her husband drinks beer and has been seen playing darts on Sunday.’

  ‘Whew!’ I said.

  ‘But she loves her brother: me, see? So any little favour he can do for me becomes a pleasure and a privilege for him. I’ll ring him in a minute, tell him that a, a, a Trusted Subordinate of mine will be calling on him first thing in the morning. Right?’

  ‘Splendid,’ I said, ‘very kind. Just one thing, though: “first thing in the morning” might mean anything really, mightn’t it. And I’m not what you’d call a dedicated early riser – often up with the lark, yes, but only when I’m on my way home to bed. Suppose we say “first thing after lunch,” eh? Catch him in the well-known post-prandial glow, d’you see? And if it wouldn’t interfere with your duty-roster too much, perhaps DC Holmes could wheel me over there; then, while I’m chatting up your bro-in-law the Super, Holmes could be collecting a bit of back-stairs stuff from the rank and file in the Duty Room over a dish of tea – you know, the sort of stuff which might not have filtered up to the higher echelons, so to say, eh? The gossip I mean, not the tea.’

  He gave me a ‘righto’ and a ‘good luck’ or two and I thank-you’d my way out.

  So content was I with my sleuthing and my cunning plans that a younger, less pompous sleuth would have stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled a jaunty air. Foolish, hubristic Mortdecai, little did you guess how the jealous gods were even then spitting on their hands and rolling up their sleeves, preparing a world-overturning wallop for you, to be collected at the very Porter’s Lodge itself.

  XIX

  Second red queen shows

  In faith I wot not well what to say,

  Thy chances been so wonderous;

  Thou Fortune with thy diverse play

  That causeth joy full dolorous.

  ‘Er, Mr Mortdecai,’ muttered the Porter as I passed into the Lodge archway.

  ‘Yes, Fred?’ I answered courteously.

  ‘That horse …’

  ‘Finished last, eh? Don’t give it another thought.’

  ‘Well, to tell the truth, sir, I put your winnings on something which could hardly stand up, like you said, but it come up mud.’

  ‘Sorry, Fred, you’ll have to translate.’

  ‘Well, it rained, see, in the morning, like, and they nearly called the meeting off but they never. The course was like Shit Creek by the fifth race.’

  ‘Dear me,’ I said absently, ‘and I suppose they called it off, what?’

  ‘Well, not the fifth they didn’t. And it turns out your horse was ’arf-brother to an ’ippopotamouse, loves mud; bred in Cambridge I reckon …’ The awful truth advanced.

  ‘Fred, are you trying to tell me …?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Mortdecai. ’E romps home while the rest of the field are blowing bleeding bubbles. I’m sorry, I never knew, did I? Or I’d’ve ’ad a few bob on meself, wouldn’t I?’ I seethed; I do not like having the Eternal Scheme of Things turned upsy-down at the whim of an equine mud-lark.

  ‘Fred,’ I gritted, ‘this time let there be no mistake; deduct a handsome commission for your trouble, then put these winnings onto a horse guaranteed to have the botts, the glanders, the stifles and the spavins, break its leg with your own hands if necessary, but let your next bulletin tell of a resounding loss. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Oh, Turner is off duty tomorrow, I’ll tell the other bloke you want tea at 10.30, right?’

  ‘Right, Fred.’

  I forget what we had for dinner at High Table. I choose to forget. Dryden was busy decocting an examination paper so I repaired to Bronwen’s set, booted the accursed pink piggy-wig downstairs yet again and went to bed with a pipkin of Scotch for my stomach’s sake (First Epistle of Paul to Timothy, V:23 – one of the few points on which Paul and I see eye to eye) and Bronwen’s copy of Douglas’s Old Calabria, that grossly neglected masterpiece, now in several masterful pieces, thanks to my recent visitors.

  If you cannot trust a senior Scone scout, whom can you trust? I know all about industrial unrest, nuclear devices, the Untergang des Abendlandes, Women’s Liberation and other threats to civilisation-as-we-know-it, but none of these is an excuse for the cup of tepid slurry which was dumped on my bedside table the next morning.

  ‘Hoy!’ I croaked at the vanishing scout as soon as I had sprayed out the preliminary sip. He returned, puzzled.

  ‘Did you say “hoy,” sir?’

  ‘Yes, I did jolly well say “hoy,” although it is a word I seldom use. I distinctly recall ordering tea; this potation tastes of cocoa, dammit!’

  ‘Sorry, sir; if it tastes of cocoa I must have brought you the coffee by mistake.’ I eyed him dangerously but decided that he was not jesting. The tea, when it arrived, would have delighted ‘the old man of Peru, Who dined upon vegetable stew,’ but it held no charm for me. I tugged on a garment or two and shuffled crossly to Broad Street, where there is still a place at which the better kind of Balliol undergraduate can order breakfast in his dressing-gown and bedroom-slippers. The waitress – ‘nourrie dans le sérail’ – could tell at a glance that I was neither a Balliol man nor any kind of undergraduate, but she knew a Charvet dressing-gown when she saw one and the tea and richly buttered toast which she brought me would have earned a grunt of approval from Jock himself.

  Later, dressed, shaven and otherwise fortified, I was in good mid-season form to greet DC Holmes when he swept discreetly up to the Porter’s Lodge in a discreetly plain-clothed motorcar.

  ‘Holmes,’ I said as we swooped towards leafy Bucks., ‘there is a testing task before you; steel yourself. Whilst I am upstairs in this rural cop-shop, making myself agreeable to the Superintendent, you will be on the Lower Deck, so to say, courteously accepting mugs of strong tea from the gum-booted arms of the Buckinghamshire law. Right?’

  ‘Yessir,’ he said; yes, there was a trace not of mutiny but of discontent in that ‘yessir:’ the sort of controlled discomfort of a hen laying a square egg.

  ‘No, look here, Holmes, it’s important: swallow your pride, be gracious to these country cousins and, when your lofty condescension has warmed their hearts, get the dirt from them. Anything at all about Dr Fellworthy, omitting no nuance however slight. Find, if you can, some rustic malcontent, some uniformed oaf, who blames the professional classes for all his own shortcomings; he’ll be the chap … but I’m sure you need no guidance from me.’

  ‘Yessir,’ he said, emitting no nuance however slight. How he forbore to call me “Watson” I shall never know; he must have been a man of iron.

  The Superintendent or brother-in-law kept me waiting just ninety seconds; a good sign. He rose to greet me: another good sign. I briefly flashed a selected credential or two and he instantly offered me a cigarette. Any ethologist could have told that the pecking-order was clearly marked out.

  As I had hoped, he bore all the signs of a man who has enjoyed his lunch. He bore, too, a confident, dominant, fearless aspect such as do all men who have to become hen-pecked cravens the moment they return to their lovely homes.

  ‘Dr Fellworthy,’ I said crisply.

  ‘Eh?’ said the Super with equal crispness. ‘Oh, that’s what it’s about, is it? Dr Fellworthy. Yes, very nice gentleman. Shocking tragedy, shocking. As it happens, I handled the case myself.’

  Any cartoonist would have seen a well-defined ‘!’ emerging in a bubble from my head.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘I was a mere Sergeant at the time.’

  The bubble stretched to bursting-point, it was now a ghetto of ‘!’s and ‘?’s. I reached into the scrambled eggs of what h
ad been my brains and picked out a solid bit.

  ‘Super!’ I said. ‘No, no, I don’t mean “super,” sorry, I mean “Super” – as in “intendent,” you understand.’ He looked at me in an odd sort of way.

  ‘Superintendent,’ I said, ‘could we sort of start again? For instance, are we talking about W.W. Fellworthy, MD (Oxon), of this parish, widower?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who lost his wife in a shocking car accident?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve made Sergeant to Superintendent in those dozen or so days since the Tragedy?’

  ‘Eight or nine years,’ he said gently. I resisted the temptation to beat my head against the edge of his desk; chaps with haughty moustaches must live up to them, you see. The Super pressed a buzzer on his desk and I whirled around, prepared to resist any male nurses in white coats who might enter with plain vans tucked under their arms.

  What entered, in fact, was a monstrous, dark-blue bosom, followed some ten inches later by its owner, the most terrifying policewoman I’ve ever seen. When I say that Jock himself would not have liked to encounter her in some dark alley I think I have said it all. The Super didn’t seem in the least frightened of her, although her spade-like hands hung down to her knees.

  ‘Petal,’ he said, ‘file on Fellworthy; fast.’ I do think that at this point he might have offered me a drink. Petal was back in a twinkling (although I realise that’s an inept word), slapped a slim file onto the Super’s desk and hovered officiously. ‘Hop it,’ he said. My respect for the man grew.

  ‘Rrrr,’ he said as he thumbed through the file, ‘yes, Agnes Hortense Fellworthy. Yes, just eight years and two months ago. Shocking.’ My eggy brain slowly unscrambled itself and an omelette began to form: baveuse or gooey in the middle but none the worse for that. Having borne with fortitude the news that Miss Fellworthy was, in fact, Mrs ditto, it was not too hard to take the tidings that there was now a brace of Mrs F.s. I phrased my question with care.

  ‘When you say “shocking,” Super, how do you mean? “Shocking,” I mean.’

  ‘Drettful,’ he explained. ‘Lovely lady, she was, I met her often. Drove out one afternoon for the shopping, down the drive, straight across the main road, right through the middle of a Cycling Club outing, through a quickset hedge and precipitated herself and vehicle over, well, a precipice. Hundred and fifty feet.’

  ‘Died instantaneously, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, no-one hardly ever walks away from a mischance of that sort, sir. Especially if your vehicle becomes a blazing holocaust as it strikes the bottom of the quarry.’ For my part I knew that I had struck pay-dirt: the nuggets of gold glistered before my eyes.

  ‘She was, of course, wearing her spectacles at the time?’

  ‘Eh? No, never wore them.’ My nuggets became fool’s gold and the iron pyrites entered into my soul.

  ‘But sun-glasses, surely,’ I whined. He thought ponderously, wetted a thumb and leafed through the file.

  ‘No. One of the Cycling Club, whom she narrowly missed killing, states that her eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead.’

  ‘Post-mortem?’

  ‘Naturally. Trace of alcohol, consistent with one sherry before lunch, confirmed by her husband. No trace of any drug or medicine. The coroner unhesitatingly returned “Accidental.” Oh, yes, I see that her own doctor, at the inquest, deposed that he had warned her against driving fast on account of being liable to short black-outs, her being pregnant, if you’ll excuse the expression.’

  ‘And was she?’

  ‘Well, no, the post-mortem didn’t show anything of that.’

  ‘But the doc in question said that she was, ah, expecting?’

  ‘No, he didn’t exactly say that, he used the term “petit male,” you know what these doctors are for fancy terms.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Could I have the name and address of this doctor, please?’

  It was four o’clock; that fearful hour when vicars’ wives and policeman take tea, a fluid which is necessary at dawn but positively harmful at other times. I declined the cup which was pressed upon me; when you have drunk one cop-shop cup of tea you have drunk them all. More to the point, when one is nurturing a lusty young chrysanthemum on the upper lip it is important to avoid nitrogenous stimulants. (I once knew a chap in the Royal West African Frontier Force who cured himself of a tiresome little infestation by soaking his pubic hair with paraffin and touching a match to it. The infestation perished; so did his marriage.)

  Down in the dungeon department I found Holmes quaffing that very liquid (tea, of course, not paraffin – I must try to be more lucid) with the pongid Petal and many an amply-booted he-copper. We drove away in the general direction of Oxford. After a few minutes he said, ‘Sir, I’m slowing down. On your right you’ll see where the original Mrs Fellworthy went to meet her Maker in the quarry and on your left you’ll see the Fellworthy domicile.’ The left was what interested me; a long, straight drive, leading straight down to the road and trimmed, on the western side only, by a high fence, like one of those flashy picket-fences you see around those places which want to look like stud-farms, but higher and with the upright posts closer together. It was not sightly, nor did I much like the look of the long, low house which squatted at the summit of the drive. Perhaps it was because there was a good chance that a murderer was even then peering at us from one of the windows. I have no especial grudge against murderers – they go their way and I go mine – but I confess that I don’t much like the thought of them looking at me thoughtfully.

  ‘Holmes,’ I said thoughtfully as the car picked up speed, ‘at what time today would you normally have ceased duty and returned to your nearest and dearest?’

  ‘Four o’clock, sir. But it’s all right, I’m quite enjoying myself and there’s no hurry. And my nearest and dearest is a norrible old landlady who sniffs me breath every time I come in and pushes leaflets under me door about Demon Drink.’

  ‘Once again you have gone to the heart of the matter, Holmes, your instincts are unerring. You see, I wished to know whether or not you were officially off duty. Plainly, you are. I wished to ascertain whether you were a dedicated teetotaller. Plainly, you are not. If you will pull into a suitably quiet road-side spot I should much like to show you a most capacious silver pocket-flask engraved with a veritable triumph of Edwardian technology.’

  After the flask had passed between us a few times, with many a musical ‘glug,’ I told him what I had learnt and invited his contribution to the seminar.

  ‘Get any dirty?’ is how I put it to him.

  ‘Yessir. And I don’t mean the tea in the canteen, ha ha.’

  ‘You should try the sherry in the Senior Common Room at Scone, ha ha.’

  On the strength of that brace of witticisms I fished out the capacious flask again and we supped, offering mute thanks to Allah, who made men hollow.

  ‘First, sir, I’ve had a word with the Sergeant who examined the charred vehicle in which the first Mrs Fellworthy met her end. He is a car buff and assured me categorically that the brakes, steering-linkages and all that had not been tampered with. He took particular interest in this scrutiny because he happens to hate the guts of Dr F. and would dearly have liked to feel his collar.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll be coming to that. Second, the first Mrs Fellworthy, as you already ascertained, never wore glasses of any shape or form. Third, she was abstemious in her own habits but generous with liquor to guests, passing policemen, postmen and such.’

  I know a hint when I hear one: I passed the flask.

  ‘Fourth, although somewhat older than Dr F., she was a lovely lady and anyone could tell she loved her husband. Doted on him, in fact, despite his occasional insensate rages.’

  ‘Insensate rages?’ I said, pricking up the ears.

  ‘I’ll be coming to that, sir. Sixth—’

  ‘Sorry, shouldn’t that have been “fifth,” Holmes?’ He counted on his fingers and agreed.

>   ‘Fifth, she was a rich or wealthy lady. She and him had a joint account at Martin’s Bank, Prince’s Risborough, which he occasionally used, but most of the heavy bills were paid by the lady, using an account with a London bank which I was not able to ascertain the name of.’

  ‘Ho ho!’ I thought to myself – well, I could hardly have been thinking to anyone else, could I? – ‘This has all the savour of the true argol or yak-turd.’

  ‘And …?’ I murmured coaxingly.

  ‘Sixth, I formed the opinion that Fellworthy is stark, staring fucking bonkers. Believed to be “suffering from mental abnormality,” as we say in the Force.’

  ‘Goodness, Holmes, did the Bucks. flatties tell you that, “in their own words,” as you say in the Force?’

  ‘Yessir. Well, they rabbitted on about our client’s general deportment and demeanour and I made the inference from the signs and symptoms described. I have been studying Forensic Psychology for my Inspector’s Examination, you see.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘That’s if I ever get my sodding Sergeant’s stripes,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘Holmes,’ I said, ‘it is clear to the meanest intelligence that you are a man of destiny. If – in this order – I; the Chief Constable of Oxfordshire; the Warden of Scone; and Heaven have any say in the matter, those stripes shall shortly be glistering upon your sleeve like jewels in an Ethiop’s ear. Particularly since your own DCI will soon be bashfully taking the credit for solving not one but two fiendish murders, unaided by human hand such as yours and mine. I’m sure you follow me?’

  ‘Yessir,’ he said.

  ‘Now; the reasoning behind your inference that Dr Fellworthy is potty?’

  ‘Insensate rages, like I said; but switching instantaneously, at will, to calm normality and charm. Classic schizo and paranoiac pattern. Like, one moment a bloke is chasing his wife with a meat-axe, frothing at the mouth; next moment, when the police and doctors arrive, he’s relaxed in an armchair, offering sherry, apologising that his wife called them out and hinting that she’s having a bad menopause. Classic.’