Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

‘I believe you told the Warden, Junior Dean, that they seemed to have an American accent, or Swedish, or perhaps Australian?’

‘Oh well yes I think I was a bit of a ninny about that you see I’ve been thinking it over and now I think but I couldn’t be sure you understand that it was a Welsh accent perhaps though I’m not awfully good at voices but one of them said “ Ve don’t usually give receipts …” ’

‘I see, that’s how Welsh chaps speak, is it?’

‘Well I don’t honestly know really I don’t think I know any Welsh people really do you I mean they left awf’lly quickly they seemed in such a hurry probably busy men I thought.’

I, too, left awf’lly quickly. My nose, usually sedentary, was fast becoming an unruly member; it seemed to be pining to return to the comparatively new-mown-hay effect of the telephone kiosk. Soon I was safe in the Bronwenry, having closed its door and filled a great tumbler of Scotch and ginger ale. I gargled happily, deep in an armchair, my feet on Bronwen’s desk, admiring the effect of the sinking sun’s mellow rays on the rich bindings and polished shelves of her bookcases. Very slowly, as I admired, one of those cartoon bubbles sprouted from the top of my head, with the conventional electric light bulb glowing inside it. The aforesaid mellow rays, you see, were at such an angle as to make the dust on the said polished shelves glow: one could see just which books had been taken out since Turner, clearly no zealous wielder of the feather duster, had last dusted. Now, no-one would have taken out and replaced any books since the two men had rummaged the rooms and if they had taken any out they would have taken them all out, if you follow me. I hastily – while the sun’s position remained advantageous – plucked out the seven assorted vols which Bronwen had consulted, hoping that they might furnish some tip as to what had been occupying her mind in the few days before she underwent the Great Change.

The Times Concise Atlas opened readily at pages 32/33 and again at 52/53: Central Europe and Western USSR respectively. Not surprising, since the late owner had professed Mod. Slavonic Studies. Feuchtwanger’s Ugly Duchess and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon : they made sense but told nothing. Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning : only proved that she’d had better taste than one would have thought. (Perhaps the fluffy pink piggy-wig was a sort of joke ? Incidentally, it was on the bloody bed again; again I dropped it down the stairwell. Memo: tell Turner ‘more dusting and fewer piggy-wigs is what this set needs.’) Back to the books. A highly covetable early edition of Boccaccio with woodcuts: shouldn’t be surprised if it inadvertently crept into my suitcase before I left. A recent Len Deighton thriller, in hardback no less: bedside reading, I supposed. Pinched from a public library but that didn’t signify: lots of otherwise upright citizens believe that pinching books doesn’t count. Last, a Shorter Greek Lexicon of Victorian date and in that hateful binding which antiquarian booksellers call ‘ecclesiastical calf.’ Some long-dead, luxurious undergraduate had told the binder to interleave it and the interleavings showed many a crabbed little notation. No use to me: I only know the first four letters of the Greek alphabet: the ones they mark on exam papers. (I was chiefly familiar with ‘Δ’ or ‘delta.’ That’s the fourth letter, if you care.) As I gave the pages one more riffle before casting it aside my eye was caught with a densely-written interleaf. It was in ball-point. There were two more such pages. The Greek was neither the small, precise script of the sedulous scholar, nor the dashing cursive squiggle of one who writes it freely; it struck me as clear but laboured. Memo: have it looked at. Might be anything.

I called for Dryden on the way to the SCR and Hall; he told me in sombre tones that he had heard through usually reliable sources that High Table was to be regaled with fricassée of turkey that night. I blenched. He made us restoratives in the shape of a pitcher of Fried Fox, which is gin with both sorts of vermouth. I took the gentle old soul out to dinner at the Luna Caprese in North Parade (so called because it points East and West and isn’t a parade, you might think, but in fact because Charles I had an encampment in those parts). Dryden proved to be a surprisingly deft spaghetti-twirler and, taking a line through this, I asked him how his Ancient Greek was. Once he appreciated that this wasn’t a vulgar joke he vouchsafed that he had no command of that tongue at all. We washed down our rognoni trifoliati and vitello alla Marsala with at least one bottle of something red, then went back to Dryden’s set and made more Fried Foxes and, to be frank, became a trifle whiffled. So whiffled were we that after a second or perhaps third pailful of Fried Fox we had sketched out an absolutely foolproof nineteen-point plan for setting the world to rights in a fortnight: the sort of plan that earnest freshmen dream up after two pints of cider. The first point, I recall, the point upon which the whole grand scheme pivoted, was that Dryden and I should that very night heave a rock through the Junior Dean’s window.

The Night Porter came upon us crawling on all fours in the Garden Quad searching for rocks which might have been overlooked by officious gardeners and, far from helping us search, implored us to repair to our beds, moving us to tears with his scenario of what the Astronomer Royal would say if we woke him. I fancy he must have helped me to my rooms; indeed, I know it for a fact, because I was in bed when I awoke, you see.

‘Awoke’ is perhaps too flimsy a word: I was in fact wrenched from sleep by a frightful hubbub which led me to believe, at first, that the Yale–Harvard Annual Football Match had chosen Bronwen’s study as its venue. My piercing shrieks brought an apologetic Turner into the bedroom; he had assumed, he said, that I was even then at breakfast and had seized the opportunity to do a little hoovering. (Why is it that technology which has put men onto the moon cannot evolve so elementary a device as a silent vacuum-cleaner, or, if it comes to that, a noiseless dish-washer, a hushed food-mixer? I suppose the answer is that women would not buy them: the housewife’s axiom is that work must not only be done but must be heard to be being done and that the more often she can cause her snoozing husband to rise from his armchair like a rocketing pheasant, the more his heart will melt at his helpmeet’s incessant toil on his behalf. Indeed, there’s probably a fortune to be made by the first man to patent a really noisy electrical hair-curler or a rowdy automatic sock-darner. The whistling kettle has shown the way.)

Setting all that aside for the moment, the simple, two-point plan I outlined to Turner was that first he should give that hoover a decent burial and that second he should bring me a pot of strong tea. Not in that order, though. Anon I heard the tea approach, rattling hideously on a tin tray; I clenched my eyelids so tightly that their muscles must have stood out like iron bands as I groped blindly for the proffered cup. Curiously, I found myself incapable of grasping the handle of the cup with any sureness. Turner coughed.

‘Excuse me, sir, but perhaps you’d find it easier if you took your pyjama-trousers off.’ I unclenched one eye so as to glare at the saucy fellow but observed, to my chagrin, that my arms and hands were indeed swathed in pyjamalegs, while a tentative movement of the ankles showed that they, too, had made an equal and opposite mistake when they put themselves to bed.

‘Turner,’ I said manfully, ‘I think I ought to make a clean breast of it: to tell the truth I believe I may have been a little worse for wine last night.’