Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

I need hardly say that I was not quite so deeply slumberous as I chose to pretend, but contrived to lie doggo while my assailants, who were two in number, rummaged or ‘frisked’ my person. This rummaging or frisking was superficial, you might say, rather than intimate ; the rummagers were evidently looking for something too large to be tucked away in some nook or cranny of my personal plumbing. Something readily found: a pistol, perhaps, or – God forbid – a book.

They slid my better wallet (sealskin) out of the inside breast pocket of my costly raiment but I was drowsily confident that they would find nothing in it except for a business card or two, an old photograph of Ingrid Bergman, an out-of-date Diner’s Club card and the £10 which we all carry these days, don’t we, so that the muggers can dash off to ‘make a connection’ and get their fix without wasting precious time kicking you to death. One likes these little transactions to be carried out with a maximum of civility and a minimum of blood or faeces, eh?

If these assailants had been cleverer they would have awakened me and asked where the other wallet was – even a CIA man would have known that there had to be another. Or at least they could have lent a little colour to their assault by nicking the tenner – I mean, you and I would have, wouldn’t we? But no; when I came to my full senses I found the contents of the wallet intact. Which is more than I can say for Bronwen’s set.

Even Jock would have been alarmed – having failed to derive any satisfaction from my person, as it were, my new friends appeared to have uprooted Bronwen’s African violets, smashed to smithereens her wireless and ransacked her record collection – a suprisingly jazzy assortment for a hag such as Bronwen (but one never can tell with these baggy-clothed, saggy-boobed academic women, a fact I once had the unexpected pleasure of discovering in the stacks of the Bodleian a fair few years ago). Most alarmingly, the rooms were strewn with my quality bespoke suitings. Framed prints, all rather predictably Ashmolean and Tate Gallery posters of the Pre-Raphaelites, had been hoisted off walls and tossed on the floor. Only Bronwen’s books were of any potential value and then only to an antiquarian bookseller or bibliophile. Most of them were now radically abridged, if you know what I mean: they had been flung across the study with great zeal and some clever cretin/inbred must have taken a surprisingly long time to ascertain that ripping up books was not a particularly effective method of finding whatever it might be that they were hoping to find.

The only thing they had left undisturbed was that damned nuisance of a pink piggy-wig. I suppose even the Shoddopsky twins had their limits.

As I surveyed the wreckage of a once orderly, if rather dull, set, I felt my head begin to spin far more dramatically than after I’d imbibed several bowls of Armagnac chased down with a late-night bucket’s worth of inferior whisky. And knowing that I could not secure one of Jock’s famed emergency kits, I began to feel the floor slipping away again as I lurched rather inelegantly onto the rummaged bedclothes that littered the lumpy bed.

When I next woke, it was a rather bitter and mournful Mortdecai who found that he had just spent an uncomfortable night curled up next to that odious pig-thing. The Mortdecai brain-pan still reeled and throbbed and there was little I could do to relieve it but sedate myself with aspirin and regular medicinal shots of whisky. I decided (or rather, my health decided for me) that it was best not to go out at all that day.

Turner, uncharacteristically shocked by the state of the rooms and the uncharacteristically large tip I proffered, set to work repairing the damage and restoring order in a fashion not dissimilar to that Mrs Spon might have employed – perhaps I’d underestimated the scout’s abilities after all. It was he, note, who brought me hot food in covered dishes from the college dining room and even managed to find some remotely palatable steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes, a bottle of passable Claret, a large chunk of exceptionally well matured Cheddar and some quite decent port, though I can’t imagine where – or how – in such a place as Scone he might have come by it.

The following morning I was relieved to find that the pain in my skull had abated almost completely. I made an uncharacteristically early sortie to the Buttery and returned to my rooms with intent to plan the day before me. It cannot have been long afterwards that the tinkle of the phone roused me from what I must confess was something of a zizz.

‘Charlie?’ It was Tom.

‘Tom,’ I said, choosing my words carefully.

‘Something of a problem, old chap, I’m afraid.’

‘Concerning, ah, your students’ assignments ?’ I enquired elaborately, raising a telephonic eyebrow.

Tom paused for an instant, clearly a little confused; there followed the inaudible sound of a penny dropping before he continued: ‘Indeed, yes. Seven of them have, er, got full marks, I’m pleased to report, but one of them, er, hasn’t done his essay at all. I popped round to his rooms, and no-one’s seen him since we had our last, um, tutorial. Most odd – he was something of a star pupil, you understand. Chap by the name of Stephanovich.’

The dots in my head began to connect and I said hurriedly. ‘I think we’d better discuss this in person – are you in for the next half-hour or so?’

‘Yes, of course. I say, Charlie, you wouldn’t care to—’

‘Smashing. I’ll be round shortly.’ I replaced the receiver with a distinct thunk.

I didn’t go round to All Souls immediately, however. There was – need I say? – a question which I had to put to Professor Weiss. An urgent question. I donned my gown – for it was raining a little – and scurried across the Quad in a dignified way, like a don pursued by a female reporter.

You probably know that a set of rooms at Oxford has two outer doors. The inner outer door is a sort of door, so to say, used merely as a door; you know, it’s useful to have something to open and shut as you go in and out. The outer outer door is called an ‘oak’ and it’s much more important: if you close it you are said to have ‘sported your oak’ and that means you are studying away at Greek epigraphy or a Cypriot lift-boy and must not be disturbed for anything less than an atom bomb on Cambridge.

Professor Weiss’s oak was not sported. Because he was senior to me I rapped at his inner outer door and counted to ten before opening it.

His lovely antique Persian carpet was in a disgraceful state: they’re never the same after being drenched with a couple of gallons of blood, ask any good dry-cleaner. Prof. Weiss looked more senior to me than when I’d last seen him; professors are never the same in such circumstances either.

I am a slave to most of the vices but even my mother would not have accused me of understatement, so I shall not say that his throat had been cut. I mean, a throat sort of starts at the front collar-stud and only goes back an inch or so, wouldn’t you say? On the other hand, it would be extravagant to say that his head had been cut off, because there was quite a bit of gristle and so forth holding it on to the rest of him. I didn’t feel his pulse; even a policeman would have guessed that the poor gentleman hadn’t cut himself while shaving.