‘There, there,’ I said, patting what I took to be her shoulder under the sheet but which proved, embarrassingly, to be what pornographers call a quivering mound and she began to steam-whistle again.
‘Oops, sorry,’ I mumbled as I fled, my carefully-built reputation for being uno di quelli shattered.
Downstairs and out through the back door, there was nothing to be seen but the ambiguous outlines of costly shrubs, no smell but the drowsy odours of night-scented whatever-they-ares and no sound but the growling of my still unfilled belly.
George might be anywhere, the rapist still more so, if his exploits had left him with any strength.
‘Chemise de femme,
Annure ad hoc
Pour la gaie prise
Et la belle choque’
was running through my head. Sonia’s nightdress, the short sort, calculated for sea-level, had been on the floor, you see, suggesting a leisurely and fastidious rapist.
There was nothing to be done out there in the garden; dirty fighting is one of my favourite outdoor sports, believe it or not, but I do like a little advantage – umbrageous shrubberies bulging with mad rapists are not my notion of advantageous ground. I attribute my long life and good health to cowardice.
I went indoors and lifted the telephone. Then I put it down again. Sonia might not want a doctor; probably a bidet and a codeine tablet would fill the bill, if I may coin a phrase. George might not want the police or any other third party to learn of the invasion of his wife’s secret garden.
What I did was, I made a stiff drink of gin and orange juice and tonic, such as I knew Sonia loved, and carried it up to the bedroom, administering it with many a ‘there, there, child’. Then I went downstairs and made a similar confection for myself, except that it was made of whisky and soda. Then I had another which tasted even better and gave me enough lightning-like decision to go across the courtyard and find Sam.
‘Sam,’ I said, when he answered my knock, ‘there is trouble across the way.’
‘Only trouble?’ he said. ‘It sounded like a steam traction-engine rally. I nearly went over but I thought it impertinent to interfere in what might be a private argument.’
I outlined the situation to him and he went to fetch Violet from the other end of the house. Her face was red and tear-stained and I cocked an inquiring eyebrow,
‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it’s just the crabs.’
‘The crabs?’ I cried, shocked by such candour. ‘My dear, however did you catch them?’
‘I didn’t. The plumber did.’
‘You are weeping because the plumber has contracted crabs?’
Sam would ordinarily have let this go on, relishing Violet’s tangled thought-patterns, but time pressed.
‘The plumber,’ he explained, ‘is a keen sea-fisher, as they all are here. He has today given us two fine shanker crabs, alive alive-oh. Violet is boiling them and the sound of their knocking on the saucepan-lid fills her with compassion. Hinc illae lackry-mae.’
Violet smiled sweetly, vacantly, through her tears.
A minute later we were at Les Cherche-fuites, where all was going as merrily as a wedding-bell. George was covered with mud, bits of wistaria and gravel-rash, and was making grating, brigadier-like noises into the telephone. Sonia was striking well-raped attitudes reminiscent of Emma Hamilton portraying Lucrece, and was fetching huge and unbecoming sobs up from deep in her thorax. Violet rushed to her and went into the ‘there, there’ and ‘now, now’ routine but to no avail, for Sonia merely shifted into the higher register. Violet steered her firmly off to the bathroom to wash her face or whatever women do for each other in times of stress.
George subsided into an armchair, glaring at the tumbler of Scotch I had pressed into his hand.
‘Bloody swine,’ he growled. ‘Raped my wife. Ruined my wistaria.’
‘I’ll send my man round first thing in the morning to have a look at it,’ said Sam. ‘The wistaria I mean. They’re very tenacious things – soon recover. Wistaria,’ he added; gratuitously, it seemed to me.
I started to tiptoe out: I love dramas but I am no sort of horticulturalist.
‘Don’t go,’ said George.
‘No, don’t go,’ said Sam.
I didn’t go, I hadn’t really wanted to. I wondered whether George had forgotten about the half of a cold duck and bottle of Fleurie. I helped myself to a little more of his Scotch.
‘Who were you telephoning, George?’ asked Sam.
‘Doctor.’
‘Wise, d’you think? Bit shaming for Sonia?’
‘Irrelevant. Bastard may have damaged her insides, given her some filthy disease, even a brat … God knows …’ His voice trailed off into a choking, hate-filled silence.
‘What I have to decide,’ he went on quietly, ‘is police or not.’
That was, indeed, a matter for thought. Even the Paid Police, if they could eventually be coaxed out from St Helier, could hardly be expected to make much of a possible footprint or two and a ravished wife’s incoherent babblings, while the Honorary Police, in the person of the local Vingtenier, pillar of the community though he might be, could do little more than search his brain for known or likely rapists in his twenty families (excluding those to whom he was related, which would rule out most) and then summon his Centenier. The Centenier, excellent and astute man, could do little more than search his brain: his appointment and specialized training were approximately those of the Chairman of a Parish Council in England and he had neither the equipment, the men, nor the skills necessary to carry out a drag-net operation or house-to-house search. And what to look for in such a search? Someone breathing hard? Worst of all, such a public fuss would stamp Sonia for ever as the ‘poor lady what got raped last Easter’.
‘On the whole,’ said Sam gently, ‘I’d think not.’
‘Yes,’ I said with my customary ambiguity.
‘I see all that,’ said George, ‘and obviously I agree with it. But there is a citizen’s duty. Personal embarrassment shouldn’t count. It’s the law, d’you see. Much more important than us. Even if it is an ass. Otherwise where are we?’
‘But if we know it can’t help?’ (Sam)
‘Well, yes, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ He thought for a while, ignoring the drink in his hand.
‘Yes, got it,’ he said at length, ‘I hold the Queen’s commission and in any case there’s that citizen’s arrest law, isn’t there. I’ll have a private chat with the Centenier tomorrow, explain my position. Then we three form a posse comitatus; hound the swine down. Yes, that’s it. Good night, you men. Report here at noon tomorrow. Bring your own sandwiches.’
Sam gazed at him aghast: Nature had not formed him to be a posse-member.
I, too, gazed at him aghast: there was clearly not going to be any cold duck that night.
Violet entered, weeping freely again.
‘It is really quite dreadful,’ she said, ‘poor dear girl. He did very odd things to her as well as, well, you know, and she is frightened out of her wits. He must have been a maniac, he was wearing a mask and funny-smelling clothes, and, oh yes, he had a sword painted on his tummy.’
George growled and cursed a bit; Sam’s eyebrows shot up and I began to muse furiously.
‘Bloody bastard,’ said George.
‘How perfectly extraordinary,’ said Sam.
‘What kind of a mask?’ I asked.
The others looked at me, a touch of rebuke in their eyes, as though I had said ‘District Nurse’ in front of the children.
‘One of those joke-shop rubber masks, she thinks. You know, Dracula or the Beast from 5,000 Fathoms.’
‘Just so,’ I said. ‘The Beast.’
‘Aha! said Sam. ‘I think I twig. But the sword thing is new, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but I think it fits.’
‘How?’
‘Not sure enough now, tell you some other time.’
‘Would somebody mind telling me,’ snarled George, ‘wha
t the f – ’ he paused, collected himself. ‘Sorry,’ he resumed, ‘I mean, I don’t quite follow you men.’
‘The Beast of Jersey,’ Sam explained. ‘You know, the chap who terrorized the Island for a dozen years; used to creep into children’s rooms, carry them out of the window, do odd things to them in the fields – not always very nasty – then pop them back into their little beds. The police think that there may have been more than a hundred such assaults but naturally most of them were not reported, for reasons which you will, um, appreciate. He used to wear a rubber mask, most of the victims said that he had an odd smell and he wore bizarre clothes, studded with nails. Just before you moved here they caught a chap called Paisnel, who is now serving thirty years, rightly or wrongly.’
‘Shouldn’t like to be him,’ I interjected, ‘convicts are madly sentimental and they do beastly things to offenders against children. Make them sing alto, see what I mean.’
‘Yes. I dare say they do. No experience in that field myself. Take your word for it.’
That was cheaper than Sam’s usual level of badinage; I made a mental note to see that he suffered for it. I’m not a vengeful chap but I can’t allow my friends to make cheap witticisms, can I? It’s a question of the quality of life.
‘What was interesting,’ Sam went on as I chewed my spleen, ‘was that Paisnel kept on saying that it was ‘all part of something’ but he wouldn’t say what and he said that when he was arrested he was on his way to meet “certain people” but he wouldn’t say whom.’
‘Perfectly obvious,’ said George; ‘the beggar was one of these witches or witchmasters. It all comes back to me now. The plumber told me all about it when he came in drunk just after Christmas. Seems it wasn’t this Paisnel fellow at all, all the locals know who it was, including most of the Honorary Police … or did he say that Paisnel was just part of it?’
‘That strain again,’ murmured Sam, ‘it hath a dying fall …’
‘Quite right. And this Paisnel had a secret room, hadn’t he, with a pottery frog or toad in it and that was supposed to be “part of it” too. And there was one of these Papist Palm Sunday crosses in the car he was nabbed in and they say he screamed when they asked him to touch it.’
‘Codswallop?’ I prompted.
‘Not necessarily. Seen too many funny things myself to be ready to scoff at, ah, funny things.’
‘In India, I dare say?’
He glared at me suspiciously.
‘Yes,’ curtly. ‘There and elsewhere. Well, mustn’t keep you chaps any longer. Good of you to help, very.’
Hunger stabbed me as I drove home. There was nothing inviting in the fridge, certainly not the half of a cold duck, but I happen to know where Jock hides his ‘perks’ and I spitefully wolfed a whole tin of caviare (the real Grosrybrest; Jock steals nothing but the best, he spurns Beluga and Ocietrova) on hot toast and left the kitchen in a horrid mess. On purpose.
Upstairs, Johanna appeared to be asleep and I slunk gratefully into bed like a thief in the night.
‘Gotcha!’ she yelled triumphantly.
‘Have a care, for God’s sake, you’ll have me singing alto.’
‘Where have you been, you naughty little stud?’
I told her the whole story and she listened enthralled.
‘Let’s play rapists,’ she said when I had finished.
‘I’m not climbing through any bloody window.’
‘I’ll let you off that bit.’
‘But I haven’t a rubber mask.’
‘Extemporize.’
‘Oh, really.’
‘I shall pretend to be asleep and you shall sneak into the room and leap upon me and work your wicked will and I shall scream and scream but very softly so as not to wake our nice landlord.’
‘Promise not to scratch?’
‘Only gently.’
Much later I crept down to the kitchen to make myself a jam-sandwich. Jock was there, moodily eating baked beans. He bore all the marks of a servant who has lost heavily at dominoes. We did not speak. I, for one, was thinking.
3
Who hath given, who hath sold it thee,
Knowledge of me?
Has the wilderness told it thee?
Hast thou learnt of the sea?
Hast thou communed in spirit with night? have the winds
taken counsel with thee?
Hertha
Johanna and I do not share a bedroom, still less a bed. To sleep in the same bed with a member of the opposite sex is barbarous, unhygienic, unaesthetic and, in these blessed days of the electric blanket, quite unnecessary. It means, too, that wakefulness in one is visited upon the other partner and, worst of all, it is conducive to carnality in the mornings – terribly bad for the heart and makes you eat too large a breakfast. When I find a woman that I want to spend the whole night with – I mean, including sleep – in the same bed, then I shall know that I’m in love – or senile. Probably, by then, both.
It was in my dressing-room, then, that Jock aroused me on Easter Tuesday. His ‘good morning’ was no gruffer than usual; there was perhaps hope that he had declared a truce. Nevertheless, I tasted my tea guardedly, for the keenest weapon in Jock’s arsenal is to make tea with water which has not quite boiled: a fearful revenge, but then Jock is a man of violence, this is why I employ him.
The tea was good. Jock had selected the Assam Flowery BOP from Jackson’s atelier and had made it with his deftest touch. I beamed upon the honest fellow.
‘Jock, today I am to be a member of a posse. Pray lay out for me a suit of Levis, a ten-gallon hat, high-heeled boots, a Winchester ’73 rifle and a strong, durable horse.’
‘We ain’t got none of that, Mr Charlie.’
‘Then plus-fours, stout boots and a great cudgel.’
‘Right. Am I coming?’
‘Not at this stage, but please stay near the telephone until I call.’
‘Right. ’Course you know you won’t catch him, don’t you?’
I gaped.
‘Catch whom?’
‘The bloke who rogered Mrs Breakspear, of course. Silly bugger, he only had to say please, didn’t he?’
‘Watch your tongue. Mr Breakspear’s a friend of mine.’
‘Sorry, Mr Charlie. But everybody …’
‘Shut up. Anyway, how do you come to have heard of the, er, incident?’
‘Girl who delivers the newspapers.’
‘But the papers come from Grouville and they’re here before eight. How can it have got so far overnight?’
‘Jersey,’ he said enigmatically.
‘Yes. Of course. But what’s this about never catching him?’
‘Use your common-sense, Mr Charlie. Where are you going to look, for one thing?’
‘I had been asking myself that, I admit. What was the other thing?’
‘They say you won’t. The Jerseys. They know.’
‘Hm, yes, that is another thing.’
‘Yeah.’
At noon, clad in thick Irish thornproof tweeds and brandishing an ashplant, I clumped in my great boots into the drawing-room at Les Cherche-fuites. George was wearing flannels and a white shirt, Sam was wearing Bermuda shorts and a silk Palm Beach shirt. They gazed at me wonderingly.
‘This is only a conference,’ George explained gently.
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Have you brought many beaters?’ Sam asked.
‘No.’
‘But a loader, perhaps?’
My riposte was swift as light.
‘I usually drink a glass of bottled beer at about this time,’ I said, and went out to the kitchen to fetch it.
Back in the drawing-room I noticed a large, ill-assembled man in a blue suit fidgeting on the edge of an upright chair. His head was many sizes too small for his great frame but his hands made up for it; they were like shovels. He proved to be the Centenier, one Hyacinthe le Mignone, and he shook hands with great gentleness, like a man who is afraid of breaking things. His voice was just such
a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar as Matthew Arnold used to delight in.
The conference had barely begun, only civilities and things had thitherto been exchanged. The Centenier began to utter.
‘Well, Mr Breakspear,’ he roared, ‘I ’aven’t yet turned up anything you could call a positive lead. We ’ave only two known sex-offenders worth the name in this Parish and neither of them seems to fit the bill. One of them has a diseased mind all right, eh? but ’is modus operandi is quite unlike that what your lady has related. ’E is chiefly interested in little girls’ bicycle-saddles which we reckon a ’armless hobby for an ageing man, though we keep a sharp eye on ’im, eh? ’E did indeed once coax a liddle lass into a daffodil field but as soon as ’e started getting above ’imself she stuck ’er finger in ’is eye and run and told ’er father, who ’appened to be the Vingtenier and ’urt the old man real nasty; I don’t reckon ’e’ll try that again, eh?’
This was entrancing stuff, it made me wish that I were a novelist.
‘The other one is just a kid of fifteen or so. ’e ’as bin blessed with a unusually large member, which ’e cannot resist showing to respectable women once in a while, eh? None of them ’as ever made a complaint but the boy always comes to me and confesses and tries to wag it at me – says ’e wants me to understand!’
‘And do you look?’ I asked, with a straight face.
‘My Chri’ no. I tell ’im to show it to the College of Surgeons and give ’im a kick up the arse, eh? I probably seen better anyway,’ he added with a betraying modesty.
‘The only other possibility,’ he went on, ‘oh, thanks, I shouldn’t really, my wife will give me hell if she smells it on me breath; the only other possibility is some person or persons unknown who in the Spring and early Summer months persists in stealing ladies’ knickers from washing lines. But this doesn’t sound like a desperate bloke who climbs in windows and takes on strong young ladies, does it? It sounds more like someone addicted to what we call the Solitary Vice. What’s more, he always pinches these great big old bloomers, eh? what we used to call bumbags, not the sort of pretty frilly things your lady will likely wear.’
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 41
