The Mortdecai Trilogy Read Free Page A

said brightly, not really hoping much.
    ‘No, really, Sir, that wouldn’t do, you know that. They’re dead narrow-minded there. We thought perhaps our Cottage Hospital, out Esher way.’
    Martland had once, in an expansive moment, told me about the ‘Cottage Hospital’ – it had given me horrid dreams for days afterward.
    ‘No no no no, no no no,’ I cried jovially, ‘I couldn’t dream of taking you lads so far out of your way.’
    ‘Well then,’ said Plug Ugly II, giving tongue for the first time, ‘what about your little place in the country, down by Stoke Poges?’
    I must admit that here I may have blenched a trifle. My private life is an open book for all to read but I did think that ‘Possets’ was a retreat known only to a few intimate friends. There was nothing that you could call illegal there but I do have a few bits of equipment myself which other folk might think a bit frivolous. A bit Mr Norris – you know.
    ‘Country cottage?’ I riposted, quick as a flash. ‘Countrycottage countrycottage countrycottage?’
    ‘Yes, Sir,’ said Plug Ugly II.
    ‘Nice and private,’ quipped his straight man.
    After a few false starts I suggested (unruffled now, suave, cool) that what would be nicest of all would be to go and call on old Martland; delightful chap, was at school with me. They seemed happy to fall in with any suggestion I made so long as it was that one, and next thing all three of us were bundling into a chance cruising taxi and P.U.II was mumbling an address into the cabby’s ear, as though I didn’t know Martland’s address as well as my own tax code.
    ‘Northampton Park,
Canonbury?
’ I tittered, ‘since when has old Martland been calling it Canonbury?’
    They both smiled at me, kindly. It was almost as bad as Jock’scivil smile. My body temperature dropped quite two degrees, I could feel it. Fahrenheit of course: I have no wish to exaggerate.
    ‘I mean, it’s hardly even Islington,’ I babbled on,
diminuendo
, ‘more Newington Green if you ask me; I mean, what a ridiculous …’
    I had just noticed that the interior of the chance cruising taxi was short of a few of the usual fitments, like notices about fares, advertisements,
door handles
. What it did have was a radio-telephone and a single handcuff attached to a ring-bolt in the floor. I sort of fell silent.
    They didn’t seem to think they needed the handcuff; they sat and looked at me thoughtfully, almost kindly, as though they were aunts wondering what I would like for tea.
    We drew up in front of Martland’s house just as his basket-work Mini trundled in from the Balls Pond Road end. It parked itself rather badly and disgorged Martland, cross and drenched.
    This was both good and bad.
    Good, because it meant that Martland couldn’t have stayed very long at the siege of my flat: Jock had evidently interlocked all the alarms as instructed and Martland, as he masterfully celluloided his way through my front door, would have been met by a Bull-O-Bashan Mk IV siren and a mightly deluge from the automatic fire sprinklers. Moreover, a piercingly strident bell, inaccessibly high on the street-front wall, would have joined in the fun and lights would have flashed in Half Moon Street Police Station and in the Bruton Street depot of an internationally known security organization which I always call Set-a-Thief. A dinky little Japanese frame-a-second robot camera would have been snapping away from its eyrie in the chandelier and, worst of all, the termagant
concierge
would have come raging up the stairs, her malignant tongue cracking like a Boer’s stock whip.
    Long before I made friends with Mr Spinoza he had asked some of his friends to ‘do my pad’ as they say, so I knew the general form. The noise of bells and sirens indescribable, the water ineluctable, the conflict of burly Z-car chaps, hairy-assed Security chaps and ordinary villains quite dreadful and, riding clear and hideous over all, the intolerable scourging of