The Mortdecai Trilogy Read Free

big to go under the headcloth so I had to cut a bit off the edge,
you
know.’
    ‘You cut a you what you didn’t Jock …’
    ‘All right Mr Charlie, just having my joke.’
    ‘Yes, all right Jock. Jolly good. Did Mr Spinoza say anything?’
    ‘Yeah, he said a
dirty
word.’
    ‘Yes, he would, I suppose.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    I embarked on the quotidian
schrecklichkeit
of getting up. With occasional help from Jock I weaned myself gingerly from shower to razor, from dexedrine to intolerable decision about necktie; arriving safely, forty minutes later, at the bourne of breakfast, the only breakfast worth the name, the
cheminot
’s breakfast, the great bowl of coffee laced and gadrooned and filigreed with rum. I was up. I had not been sick. The snail was on the thorn, to name but one.
    ‘I don’t think we’ve
got
a green Homburg, Mr Charlie.’
    ‘It’s all right, Jock.’
    ‘I could send the porter’s little girl over to Lock’s if you like?’
    ‘No, it’s all right, Jock.’
    ‘She’d go for half a crown.’
    ‘No, it’s all
right
, Jock.’
    ‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’
    ‘You must be out of the flat in ten minutes, Jock. No guns or anything like that left here, of course. All alarms turned on and interlocked. Foto-Rekorda loaded with film and cocked – you know.’
    ‘Yeah, I know.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said, draping an extra set of inverted commas around the word, like the verbal snob I am.
    Picture, then, this portly lecher swishing down Upper Brook Street, W. I , all sails set for St. James’s Park and high adventure. A tiny muscle twitching in the cheek – perhaps in the best tradition– but otherwise outwardly urbane, poised, ready to buy a bunch of violets from the first drab and toss her a golden sov.; Captain Hugh Drummond-Mortdecai MC, with a music-hall song on his whistling lips and a fold of silk underpants trapped between his well-powdered buttocks, bless him.
    They were after me from the moment I emerged, of course–well, not actually
after
me because it was a ‘front tail’ and very prettily done too: the SPG boys have a year’s training, for God’s sake – but they didn’t pick me up at noon as predicted. Back and forth I went past the pond (saying unforgivable things to my friend the pelican) but all they did was pretend to examine the insides of their absurd hats (bursting with two-way radios, no doubt) and make furtive signals to each other with their red, knobbly hands. I was really beginning to think that I had overrated Martland and was just about to beat up to the Reform Club and make someone give me luncheon – their cold table is the best in the world you know – when:
    There they were. One on each side of me. Enormous, righteous, capable, deadly, stupid, unscrupulous, grave, watchful, hating me gently.
    One of them laid a restraining hand on my wrist.
    ‘Be off with you,’ I quavered. ‘Where do you think you are –
Hyde
Park?’
    ‘Mr Mortdecai?’ he grumbled capably.
    ‘Stop grumbling capably at me,’ I protested, ‘this is, as you well know, I.’
    ‘Then I must ask you to come along with me, Sir.’
    I gazed at the man. I had no idea that people still said that. Is ‘dumbfounded’ the word I want?
    ‘Eh?’ I said, quoting freely from Jock.
    ‘You must come along o’me, Sir.’ He was working well now, really settling in to the part.
    ‘Where are you taking me?’
    ‘Where would you like to go, Sir?’
    ‘Well, er
… home?
’
    ‘I’m afraid that wouldn’t do, Sir. We wouldn’t have our equipment there, you see.’
    ‘Equipment? Oh, yes. I quite see. Goodness.’ I counted my pulse, my corpuscles and a few other necessary parts.
Equipment
. Dammit,Martland and I had been at school together. They were trying to frighten me, clearly.
    ‘You are trying to frighten me, clearly,’ I said.
    ‘No, Sir. Not yet we aren’t, Sir.’
    Can you think of a really smart answer to that one? Neither could I.
    ‘Oh well then. Off to Scotland Yard, I suppose?’ I