The Mortdecai Trilogy (19 page)

‘Lie forward,’ I snarled at him.

‘Can’t, Mr Charlie – I’m up to me belly.’

‘Wait, I’ll get the suitcase.’

I had to strike a match to find the suitcase, then another to find Jock again in the tantalizing shimmer of wet sand and starshine. I thrust the suitcase forward and he laid his arms on it, hugging it to his chest, driving it into the mud as he bore down on it.

‘No good, Mr Charlie,’ he said at last. ‘I’m up to me armpits and I can’t breathe much any more.’ His voice was a horrid travesty.

Behind us – not nearly far enough behind us – I heard the rhythmic patter of feet on wet sand.

‘Go on, Mr Charlie, scarper!’

‘Christ, Jock, what do you think I am?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he gasped. ‘Piss off. But do me a favour first. You know. I don’t want it like this. Might take half an hour. Go on,
do
it.’

‘Christ, Jock,’ I said again, appalled.

‘Go on, me old mate. Quick. Put the leather in.’

I scrambled to my feet, aghast. Then I couldn’t bear the noises he was making any more and I stepped on to the suitcase with my left foot and trod on his head with my right foot, grinding at it. He made dreadful noises but his head wouldn’t go under. I kicked at it frantically again and again, until the noises stopped, then I clawed up the suitcase and ran blindly, weeping with horror and terror and love.

When I heard the water chuckling below me I guessed my position and threw myself at the channel, not caring whether it was the crossing place or not. I got over, leaving my right shoe in the mud –
that
shoe, thank God – and ran north, each breath tearing at my windpipe. Once I fell and couldn’t get up; behind me and to the left I saw torches flickering: perhaps one of them had gone to join Jock – I don’t know, it’s not important. I kicked the other shoe off and got up and ran again, cursing and weeping, falling into gullies, tearing my feet on stones and shells, the suitcase battering at my knees, until at last I crashed into the remains of the breakwater at Jenny Brown’s Point.

There I pulled myself together a little, sitting on the suitcase, trying to think calmly, starting to learn to live with what had happened. No, with what I had done. With what I
have
done. A soft rain began to fall and I turned my face up to it, letting it rinse away some of the heat and the evil.

The knapsack was back at Quicksand Pool; all the necessities of life were in it. The suitcase was almost empty except for some packets of currency. I needed a weapon, shoes, dry clothes, food, a drink, shelter and – above all – a friendly word from someone, anyone.

Keeping the low limestone cliffs on my right hand I stumbled along the shore for almost a mile to Know End Point, where the saltmarsh proper begins – that strange landscape of sea-washed turf and gutters and flashes where the finest lambs in England graze.

Above me and to my right shone the lights of the honest bungalow dwellers of Silverdale: I found myself envying them bitterly. It is
chaps like them who have the secret of happiness, they know the art of it, they always knew it. Happiness is an annuity, or it’s shares in a Building Society; it’s a pension and blue hydrangeas, and wonderfully clever grandchildren, and being on the Committee, and just-a-few-earlies in the vegetable garden, and being alive and wonderful-for-his-age when old so-and-so is under the sod, and it’s double-glazing and sitting by the electric fire remembering that time when you told the Area Manager where he got off and that other time when that Doris …

Happiness is easy: I don’t know why more people don’t go in for it.

I stole along the road leading up from the shore. My watch said 11.40. It was Friday, so licensing hours would have ended at eleven, plus ten minutes drinking-up time plus, say, another ten minutes getting rid of the nuisances. My soaked and ragged socks made wet whispers on the pavement. There were no cars outside the hotel, no lights on in front. I was starting to shake with cold and reaction and the hope of succour as I hobbled through the darkened car park and round to the kitchen window.

I could see the landlord, or joint proprietor as he prefers to be called, standing quite near the kitchen door; he was wearing the disgraceful old hat which he always puts on for cellar work and his face, as ever, was that of a hanging judge. He has watched my career with a jaundiced eye for some five and twenty years, on and off, and he has not been impressed.

He opened the kitchen door and looked me up and down impassively.

‘Good evening, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said, ‘you’ve lost a bit of weight.’

‘Harry,’ I gabbled, ‘you’ve got to help me. Please.’

‘Mr Mortdecai, the last time you asked me for drinks after hours was in nineteen hundred and fifty-six. The answer is still no.’

‘No, Harry, really. I’m in serious trouble.’

‘That’s right, Sir.’

‘Eh?’

‘I said – “that’s right, Sir.’”

‘How d’you mean?’

‘I mean two gentlemen were here inquiring after your whereabouts last evening, stating that they were from the Special Branch.
They were most affable but they displayed great reluctance to produce their credentials when requested to do so.’ He always talks like that.

I didn’t say anything more, I just looked at him beseechingly. He didn’t actually smile but his glare softened a little, perhaps.

‘You’d better be off now, Mr Mortdecai, or you’ll be disturbing my routine and I’ll be forgetting to bolt the garden door or something.’

‘Yes. Well, thanks, Harry. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, Charlie.’

I slunk back into the shadow of the squash court and crouched there in the rain with my thoughts. He had called me
Charlie
, he never had before. That was one for the book: that was the friendly word. Jock, at the end, had called me his old mate.

One by one the lights in the hotel went out. The church clock had struck half-past midnight with the familiar flatness before I crept round the building, through the rock terrace, and tied the garden door. Sure enough, someone had carelessly forgotten to bolt it. It gives on to a little sun-parlour with two sun-faded settees. I peeled off my drenched clothes, draped them on one settee and my wracked body on the other, with a grunt. As my eyes grew used to the dimness I discerned a group of objects on the table between the settees. Someone had carelessly left a warm old topcoat there, and some woollen underclothes and a towel: also a loaf of bread, three quarters of a cold chicken, forty Embassy tipped cigarettes, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and a pair of tennis shoes. It’s astonishing how careless some of these hoteliers are, no wonder they’re always complaining.

It must have been four o’clock in the morning when I let myself out of the little sun-parlour. The moon had risen and luminous clouds were scudding across it at a great pace. I skirted the hotel and found the footpath behind it which goes across the Lots, those strangely contoured limestone downs clad with springy turf. I gave the Burrows’ heifers the surprise of their lives as I jogged between them in the dark. It is only a few hundred yards to the Cove, where once the sailing ships from Furness unloaded ore for the furnace at Leighton Beck. Now, since the channels shifted, it is close-nibbled turf, covered with a few inches of sea-water two or three times a month.

What is more to the point, there is a cave in the cliff, below the inexplicable ivy-gnawed battlements which surmount it. It is an uninviting cave, even the children do not care to explore it, and there is reputed to be a sudden drop at the end of it, to an unplumbed pit. Dawn was making its first faint innuendos in the East as I clambered in.

I slept until noon out of sheer exhaustion, then ate some more of the bread and chicken and drank more of the Scotch. Then I went to sleep again: dreams would be bad, I knew, but waking thoughts for once were worse. I awoke in the late afternoon.

The light is fading rapidly now. Later tonight I shall call on my brother.

To be exact, it was in the early hours of this Sunday morning that I stole out of the cave and drifted up into the village through the dark. The last television set had been reluctantly switched off, the last poodle had been out for its last piddle, the last cup of Bournvita had been brewed. Cove Road was like a well-kept grave: husbands and wives lay dreaming of past excesses and future coffee-mornings; they gave out no vibrations, it was hard to believe they were there. A motor car approached, driven with the careful sedateness of a consciously drunk driver; I stepped into the shadows until it had passed. A cat rubbed itself against my right foot; a few days ago I would have kicked it without compunction but now I could not even kick my own brother. Not with that foot.

The cat followed me up the slope of Walling’s Lane, mewing inquisitively, but it turned tail at the sight of the big white tom who crouched under the hedge like a phantom Dick Turpin. Lights were burning up at Yewbarrow and a strain of New Orleans jazz filtered down through the trees – old Bon would be settling down to an all-night poker and whisky session. As I turned right at Silver Ridge there was one brief deep bay from the St. Bernard, then no more sounds save for the whisper of my own feet along Elmslack. Someone had been burning garden rubbish and a ghost of the smell lingered – one of the most poignant scents in the world, at once wild and homely.

Off the lane I picked my way along the just discernible footpath which drops down to the back wall of Woodfields Hall, the seat of Robin, Second Baron Mortdecai, etc. Golly, what a name.
He was born shortly before the Great War, as you can tell: it was
de rigueur
to call your son Robin in that decade and my mother was remorselessly
de rigueur
, as anyone could tell you, if nothing else.

You’d never guess where I am writing this. I’m sitting, knees doubled up to my chin, on my childhood’s lavatory in the nursery wing of my brother’s house. It has happier memories for me than most of the rest of the house, which is haunted by my father’s cupidity and chronic envy, my mother’s febrile regret at having married an impossible cad and now by my brother’s crawling disgust at everything and everyone. Including himself. And especially me – he wouldn’t spit in my face if it were on fire, unless he could spit petrol.

Beside me on the wall there is a roll of soft, pink lavatory paper: our nurse would never have allowed that, she believed in Spartan bums for the children of the upper classes and we had to use the old-fashioned, crackling, broken-glass variety.

I have just been in my old bedroom which is always kept ready for me, never altered or disturbed; just the kind of false note my brother loves sardonically to strike. He often says, ‘Do remember that you always have a home here, Charlie,’ then waits for me to look sick. Under a floorboard in my room I groped for and found a large oilskin package containing my first and favourite handgun, a 1920 Police and Military Model Smith and Wesson .455, the most beautiful heavy revolver ever designed. A few years ago, before I took up whisky as an indoor sport, I could do impressive things to a playing card with this pistol at twenty paces, and I am confident that I could still hit a larger target in a good light. Like, say, Martland.

There is one box of military ammunition for it – nickel jacketed and very noisy – and most of a box of plain lead target stuff, hand-loaded with a low powder charge, much more useful for what I have in mind. You wouldn’t be allowed to use it in war, of course, that soft lead ball can do dreadful things to anything it hits, I’m happy to say.

I shall finish my bottle of Teacher’s, with a wary eye on the door lest a long-dead Nanny should catch me, then go downstairs and visit my brother. I shall not tell him how I got into the house. I shall just let him worry about it, it’s the sort of thing he does worry about. I have no intention of shooting him, it would be an inexcusable
self-indulgence at this time. In any case, it would probably be doing him a favour and I owe him a lot of things but no favours.

I called him brother, Englishman and friend!

As I let myself quietly into the library, my brother Robin was sitting with his back to me, writing his memoirs with a scratchy noise. Without turning round or ceasing to scratch at the paper he said,

‘Hullo, Charlie, I didn’t hear anyone let you in?’

‘Expecting me, Robin?’

‘Everyone else knocks.’ Pause. ‘Didn’t you have any trouble with the dogs as you came through the kitchen garden?’

‘Look, those dogs of yours are as much use as tits on a warthog. If I’d been a burglar they’d have offered to hold my torch.’

‘You’ll be wanting a drink,’ he said, flatly, insultingly.

‘I’ve given it up, thanks.’

He stopped scribbling and turned round. Looked me up and down, slowly, caressingly.

‘Going ratting?’ he asked at last.

‘No, you needn’t worry tonight.’

‘Would you like something to eat?’

‘Yes, please. Not now,’ I added as his hand went to the bell. ‘I’ll help myself later. Tell me who has been asking for me lately.’

‘No village drabs with babies in their arms this year. Just a couple of comedians from some obscure branch of the Foreign Office, I didn’t ask what they wanted. Oh, and a hard-faced bitch who said you’d been heard of in Silverdale and wanted to ask you to address the Lakeland Ladies’ Etching Society or something of that sort.’

‘I see. What did you tell them?’

‘Said I thought you were in America, was that right?’

‘Quite right, Robin. Thanks.’ I didn’t ask him how he knew I had been in America; he wouldn’t have told me and I didn’t really care. He sets aside a certain portion of his valuable time to following my doings, in the hopes that one day I’ll give him an opening. He’s like that.

‘Robin, I’m on a Government assignment which I can’t tell you about but it does involve getting quietly up into the Lake District and living rough for a few days – I need some stuff. A sleeping bag, some tinned food, a bicycle, torch, batteries, that sort of thing.’ I
watched him thinking how many of the items he could plausibly pretend not to have. I unbuttoned my coat, which fell open: the handle of the Smith and Wesson stuck up out of my waistband like a dog’s leg.