The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  How you deal with the tongue of an ox is as follows: you bid the butcher keep it in his pickle-tub for a fortnight, brushing aside his tearful pleas that it should be taken out after eight days. Then you rinse it lovingly and thrust it into the very smallest casserole that will contain it, packing the interstices with many an onion, carrot and other pot-herb. Cover it with heel-taps of wine, beer, cider and, if your cook will let you, the ripe, rich jelly from the bottom of the dripping-pot. Let it ruminate in the back of your oven until you can bear it no longer; whip it out, transfix it to a chopping-board with a brace of forks and – offer up grateful prayers to Whomever gave tongues to the speechless ox. (You can, of course, let it grow cold, when it will slice more delicately, but you will find that you can eat less of it.)

  What I am trying to suggest, in my clumsy way, is that we had hot tongue for dinner, along with deliciously bitter turnip-tops and a Pomme Duchesse or two for the look of the thing. Eric and Johanna acquitted themselves nobly but I fancy I was well up amongst the leaders.

  Later, sinking back amongst the cushions and the apricot brandy, I detected a jarring note. Jock, clearing away the broken meats, was now wearing a black Jersey or Guernsey, a pair of black slacks, black running-shoes and all the signs of a man who might well be carrying a deadly weapon.

  ‘What’s this?’ I cried. ‘What’s this? Have you been watching the television again? I’ve told you and told you …’

  ‘We’re going out tonight, Mr Charlie, aren’t we? Going to chapel, remember?’

  In truth I had quite forgotten. I shall not pretend that the oxtongue turned to ashes in my belly but it certainly started to give signs of discontent with its lot.

  ‘We’ll have to put it off, Jock; I forgot to get the cockerel.’

  ‘Me and Farver Eric collected it ’s’afternoon. Lovely bird it is, too, black as your hat.’

  I drank all the coffee that was left and bolted the pill which Jock slipped me. Then, as is my wont when attending Satanic Masses in draughty medieval chapels, I packed a few iron rations such as liqueur Scotch, a paper of pheasant sandwiches and a small jar of Pâté de Lièvre into a briefcase; adding, after reflection, a pair of coarse warm pyjamas – who knew where I might spend the night? – and, mindful of Johanna’s admonition, a toothbrush and tooth-powder.

  We drove to George’s house and collected Sam and him, both of them grumbling and sulking, then off we all sped on a total of eight wheels: Jock and Eric in my Mini, which was to be their get-away vehicle, and the rest of us in George’s large, capable, boring Rover. Just before we left I was kind enough to ask George whether his Rover was licensed, taxed, oiled and possessed of a Roadworthiness Certificate. He looked at me pityingly, of course, but I’m used to that. People are always looking at me pityingly; it’s because they think I’m potty, you see. Off, as I say, we sped through the night towards La Hougue Bie and were soon elaborately lost, which is a surprisingly easy thing to do in Jersey because all the country roads, thanks to something called La Visite du Branquage, look exactly the same. Indeed, getting lost in Jersey is one of the few outdoor sports one can enjoy in the colder evenings: it’s tough on petrol but it saves you a fortune in other ways. None of us got very cross except, of course, George. When we finally pitched up at the site we parked the Rover at a discreet distance; Jock, it seemed, had already secreted the Mini in some furtive backwater which he had previously reconnoitred. We foregathered at the main gate. It really wasn’t worth diddling the padlock: George did a splendid Army-style gate-vault and I, full of stinking pride, followed suit and bruised my belly badly. Sam and Eric, long purged of any competitive spirit, simply crept between the bars. I didn’t see what Jock did, he’s a professional – he simply materialized beside us in the dark.

  We huddled together glumly, just inside the gate, while Jock loped off soundlessly into the night, feather-footed as any questing vole, to ascertain that the honest proprietaries of the ossuaries were abed. It seemed a very long time before he reappeared.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Charlie, but there was this courting couple, see, and I had to put the fear into them, didn’t I? See them off, see?’

  ‘And are they quite gone now?’

  He looked at me miffedly. When Jock sees people off, they stay seen off.

  ‘Yes, Mr Charlie. Off like bleeding rabbits, him still holding his trousers up, her leaving certain garments behind in a wasteful fashion which I happen to have in my pocket this moment if you wish to check.’

  I shuddered delicately, told him I would take his word for it.

  Urged by a now surly George and Sam, we made our way over to the great mound itself, that horrid pile of the guts of ages long-gone and never to be one-half comprehended. Jock busied himself briefly with the padlock and chain which guarded the entrance to the underground passage leading to the grave-chamber and disappeared with Eric, my tape-recorder and a plastic bag full of the best toads available. When they emerged we all made our way up the winding path which leads to the chapels crowning the mound. Jock was as good as his word: the lock of the Jerusalem Chapel fell to his bow and spear with no more protest than a subdued clunk.

  Eric bustled into the chapel in a business-like way, as one to the manner born. George, Sam and I followed him with different degrees of reticence. The rooster had been fed with raisins soaked in rum by Jock: I wish to make it clear that it was not I who carried it. Eric wasted no time; he dabbed little bits of this and that on the remains of the ancient altar and then spread over it his splendid corporal. The rest of us huddled, a little sheepishly perhaps, at the back of the tiny chancel – no larger than a bathroom in the better kind of country house. When I say ‘the rest of us’ I exclude Jock, of course, who was lurking somewhere in the shadows of the porch – his favourite place in times of turpitude and quite right too.

  Strong though we were of purpose, I suspect that a show of hands, had it been taken at that moment, would have indicated a pretty nem. con. desire to return home and forget the whole thing. Except for Eric. He was growing almost visibly, taking on the stature of the craftsman who knows that what he is doing is not a thing that anyone else could do better; the dignity, if you like, of a scientist devising a hydrogen bomb, torn by the knowledge of evil but driven by the compulsion of research and the jackboot of human history.

  ‘You will now be silent!’ he suddenly said in a voice of such authority that we all stood up straight. He was wearing a long, white soutane sort of thing made of heavy silk; the only illumination came from the single candle he had placed on the altar: an ordinary white one, I noticed, and the right way up. Any mumbo-jumbo, it was evident, was not likely to embody the word ‘abracadabra’. The candle lit up only the text of the travesty of the Mass before him and a small but startling patch of the embroidery on the corporal.

  He said, or seemed to say, a few sentences under his breath. I did not try to hear, I have troubles of my own. Then, in a high, clear voice, he began to patter out the Introit, with the canting, carneying kind of intonation that old-fashioned Irish priests used to use – and still do for all I know. I dare say Sam may have picked up some of the Latin nastinesses that started to creep into the Ritual but I’m sure they were all Greek to George. I, who had both copied and, later, typed out, the Ritual, was expecting these passages, but nevertheless, on Eric’s lips they seemed to sound nastier every minute. When he came to the part which, in Lord Dunromin’s MS, had been filled only with a rectangle of red ink containing the words Secrets Infâmes, his voice, startlingly, dropped quite two octaves and in a horrid, bass grunt he began rhythmically to intone a number of names beginning with Ashtaroth, Astarte, Baal, Chemoz – people like that. I am happy to say that I do not remember more than a few of them – and if I did I certainly should not write them down here: I am not a superstitious man but I do not believe in poking sleeping gods in the eye with a sharp stick. I’m sure you understand me.

  We three others had all, I suppose, been prepared for a mixture of tedium and embarrassment bu
t it was quite extraordinary how little Eric Tichborne exuded a sort of aura of command – extraordinary, too, how he changed in stature. When his voice returned to the canting, seminary-priest’s whine the inflections seemed to rise and fall in an almost inhuman way which I seemed to have heard before. On the previous night. Coming from my own tape-recorder. I did not like it a bit.

  During the particularly tasteless mockery of the Kyrie Eleison his voice seemed to be shaking with an emotion which could have been suppressed laughter or, indeed, suppressed tears. Certainly not Pastis. But the strangest thing came afterwards, for his speech seemed to accelerate to a point where he was rattling off words at a speed which one would not have thought the human voice-box capable of. It went on accelerating until it had become the unnerving twitter of – yes – of a tape-recorder played at too fast a speed. This suddenly, inexplicably, broke off and we could hear the agonized rasp of his breathing. This, too, changed, as we watched and listened, and as he bowed and cramped into a spasm apparently asthmatic: wrenching coughs and retchings racked his little frame and, in between, he yelled out bits of Ezekiel: ‘ … young men riding upon horses … there were her breasts pressed … there she bruised the teats of her virginity … ’

  George half-rose and looked at me with a question. I shook my head. This was not something to interfere with. Bit by bit the little broken priest re-assembled himself, leaned upon the altar and pursued the increasingly filthy Ritual but more and more as though the words hurt him physically. It was probably an illusion caused by the candle-flame, but it seemed to me that he was being buffeted about by something that could not have been a wind. I stole a glance at the others: George’s face was a mask of disapproval and disgust, his mouth not quite closed. Sam, to my astonishment, displayed a face crumpled up with compassion and, if I was not mistaken, traced with tears.

  I don’t know what my own face looked like.

  Up at the altar, only his hands clearly visible in the pool of candlelight, Fr Tichborne jerked and swayed as his voice grew ever shriller, more frantic. I did not ask the others, afterwards, what they saw but to my mind the light seemed to thicken. I became acutely conscious, all of a sudden, of being exactly above the grave-chamber of the dolmen. Through the soles of my feet I seemed to feel a grinding crepitation as though the great slabs of the roof underground were shifting against the slabs of the side-walls. I am very much grown up, mature and not in the least superstitious, but I don’t mind admitting that I wished, just then, that I were young enough to wish that my mother were there, if you take my meaning. Not that she would have helped, of course; she wasn’t that kind of mother.

  Something was being burned on the altar now, something which gave off a thick, delicious smoke that muddled our thoughts. The rooster was produced and displayed and then certain beastly things happened to it which, in an ordinary time and place, I dare say we shout have prevented. The priest turned round to us, arms raised, his gown now kilted up above his navel to keep it clear of the blood-stains. George turned completely around, his face sunk in his hands. Sam did not move but I could hear him whimpering very quietly, piteously. I am, as I have often pointed out, a mature and sensible man; moreover I had personally copied out the Ritual and knew what was coming – I was a little surprised, therefore, to find that I had crossed the fingers of both my hands.

  It cannot have been Eric’s voice which began to bellow Great Salute and Imprecation of S. Sécaire: so little a man could never have whooped and bayed in so disgusting a fashion, nor can I believe that the rocks beneath the chapel could have shifted and groaned so hideously as they seemed to. In that thick, stupefying atmosphere, amidst those atavistic animal noises, nothing was real and when Eric seemed to rise some eight inches from the floor my fuddled surprise was only that I had not seen that he was barefooted and had not known that his right foot was horribly deformed. He was stuttering out the list of things which S. Sécaire offers to those against whom he is invoked when I saw his face blacken. He fell towards us on his face. His face, when it struck the stone floor, made a sound which I have been trying to forget ever since. It was inches from my shoe. The silk robe was almost up to his armpits; his body was not good to look at. He went on making odd noises – how was I to know that he was dead?

  In any case, it was just then that the door burst open and all sorts of Centeniers, Vingteniers, Connétable’s officers, aye and even members of the dread Paid Police themselves, thronged in and arrested every one of us again and again.

  Now, according to my plans, you see, we should have been neatly arrested, charged with breaking and entering, and fined some five bob each the next day, giving enough details to enable the Jersey Evening Post to make it known to one and all – and particularly, of course, to the witchmaster rapist chap – that the Mass of St Sécaire had in fact been held, with him as the objective. I had, perhaps rather coyly, not made it perfectly clear to George and Sam that we should probably all have to spend the night in durance vile: that is to say, what you and I call ‘the nick’ – I don’t like to cause people premonitory pain, do you? – and of course they would not, in any case, have agreed to the notion.

  As it turned out, neither Sam nor George had really pulled himself together before we arrived at the Cop-shop in Rouge Bouillon, nor did they fully understand that they were to be the involuntary guests of the Deputy Lieutenant and Commander-in-Chief of Jersey until they – we – were issued with two blankets apiece, a cup of cocoa and a capital piece of bread and dripping, which I for one was ready for. Luckily, there were plenty of cells – the tourist season had scarcely begun – so that I had one all to myself and was spared any recriminations which my friends might otherwise, in the heat of the moment, have thought fit to heap upon me. The infinitely kindly policeman-gaoler permitted me to keep my briefcase of pyjamas, sandwiches and Scotch, exacting only a token tribute from the last. I shall not pretend that I slept well but at least I brushed my teeth, unlike some I could name.

  12

  Where the dead red leaves of the years lie rotten,

  The cold old crimes and the deeds thrown by,

  The misconceived and the misbegotten,

  I would find a sin to do ere I die,

  Sure to dissolve and destroy me all through …

  The Triumph of Time

  We who assembled in the Commander’s office at half-past eight the next morning were but a moody crew. George and Sam seemed to be harbouring some petty resentment about the fact that I had had the simple foresight to pack my toothbrush and things. Perhaps, too, they just didn’t like being locked up: there are people like that.

  George was stalking up and down, four paces to the left, four to the right, like the captain of a very small ship pacing whatever it is that master-mariners pace. He was snarling a string of names of influential people, all of whom, he made it clear, he was about to telephone, and in the order named. Sam sat in a sort of collapsed lump: like me, he is a lovely talker when he has had his pre-luncheon drinks, but not before, really.

  When George had exhausted his mental address-book, the Commander of Detectives cleared his throat in a way that gave the merest hint of smugness.

  ‘Grave charges,’ he said. ‘Graver, perhaps, than you realize. Certainly graver than we had anticipated. Serious view they’ll take of it. Serious. Unacceptable, you see.’

  Sam made a brief reference to the Southern end of the digestive tract, in the plural, then relapsed into his lump.

  ‘No, no, sir,’ said the C of D, ‘that doesn’t help a bit, not that attitude doesn’t. Constructive is the word. Let’s be constructive. See what we can work out. Least harmful, least publicity, least cost to the taxpayer, eh?’

  Sam made a suggestion which might or might not have given pleasure to the average taxpayer.

  ‘There you are again, you see, sir. Interesting biologically but not what you’d call constructive. Lucky we haven’t got a police stenographer in here, eh?’ The gentle threat floated gently to the ground. Sam grumbled,
‘Sorry’, and George said, ‘Hrrmph’. I said that I wasn’t used to drinking cocoa for breakfast. The C of D produced his whisky bottle in an insulting fashion.

  Then he explained to us, with thinly-disguised relish, that we were up an improbably-named creek in a concrete canoe without a paddle and that the kindest thing he could do, before clapping us into his deepest dungeon, was to allow us to make one telephone call each. George’s advocate, the grandest imaginable, kept on saying ‘oh dear, oh dear’, until George slammed the instrument down. Sam’s advocate seemed to be saying ‘oy oy, oy oy’ until Sam told him curtly that he wanted no moaning at the bar.

  My own chap is but a mere solicitor and his reaction was crisp. ‘Put the copper on,’ he said, crisply.

  Two minutes later the C of D told us, crisply, that it had just occurred to him that he couldn’t hold us until he could think of some better charges and that, if we were prepared to go through a trifling formality at the box-office, we were free to go for the time being.

  We went. I was prepared to chat freely on the way home but the others seemed both tacit and mute. I shall never understand people.

  At home, Johanna greeted me with her cryptic smile, the one that makes her look like a rich man’s Mona Lisa, and the sisterly sort of kiss with which a wife tells you that she loves you; but. Scorning explanations, I swept off to my dressing-room, leaving instructions that I should be called at twenty minutes before luncheon.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said. She has a gift for words.

  In the event it was Jock who aroused me from a hoggish slumber, which had been intermingled with fearful dreams.

  ‘Chops, Mr Charlie,’ he said, ‘and chips and them little French beans.’

  ‘You interest me strangely. By the way, Jock, did you make good your escape last night without any, ah, friction?’