Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

‘Why, Mrs Fellworthy’s husband.’

‘But she was Miss Fellworthy …’

‘No, sir; she was married and separated. Thought you knew.’

‘Redundant, mud-headed old prick!’ I snarled bitterly. His face froze into that expression which public servants adopt when abused by members of the public in the absence of witnesses.

‘No no no, dear old DCI,’ I said hastily, ‘not you at all; I was thinking of a Fellow and Tutor of my College who should have told me of this husband at the outset.’

‘Probably didn’t know,’ he said mildly. ‘She was one of these illiberalated women or whatever they call themselves – we call them baggy-boobs if you’ll pardon the term – and she always went by the style of “Ms.” ’ I gazed at him reverently: he had pronounced it. I couldn’t resist showing off.

‘Did you spend much time in the N’Gorongoro country?’ I asked in a knowledgeable sort of voice. ‘No, never mind, just a thought, just a thought. More to the point; who, what and where is this spouse, this soul-mate, this husband of Bronwen’s, er, bosom?’

‘He’s by way of being a doctor, sir, lives in leafy Bucks., somewhere round Lacey Green way. Wait, here’s his card, I’ve got it right here.’ I studied it. W.W. Fellworthy was no mere MB but an actual MD (Oxon), a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and – here I raised a respectful eyebrow – a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot and no less.

‘An exceedingly pleasant gentleman,’ continued the DCI, ‘and most upset about the shocking tragedy. Most grieved. Rushed up to Oxford the moment he read about it in the papers, wanted to make funeral arrangements, make his last farewell to the corpus delicti. (We had to put him off that, of course, I mean, we’d had to scrape her out of the wreckage like a pot of strawberry jam, as the old song says, and then we’d done the necropsy and they never look the same after that, do they – are you all right, sir? – so there wasn’t any way of brushing her lips with a last, chaste kiss because – you sure you’re all right, sir?) Well, as I was saying, he wanted to collect her personal effects; she hadn’t got much except her library of books, which she’d left to some Women’s College, but he just wanted her intimate possessions, handbag, glasses – he specially asked for her glasses – little things like that. Sentimental, you see. I could tell he was still passionately enamoured of her, almost weeping at the thought that never again would he slip the diaphanous, silken undergarments from those quivering mounds …’ His eyes hooded, his voice faltered. Either he nourished some hidden, policemanly vein of the true romance or his vice squad had recently raided a pornographic bookshop. My own eyes, too, were a bit hooded, for it seemed to me that only a Quasimodo could possibly bring himself to prise the hairy, orange Donegal tweed from Bronwen’s sagging dugs; but there you are, aren’t you? I mean, that’s what makes horse-races, isn’t it?

There was, however, a bit more to the Mortdecai eye-hooding than mere vulgar curiosity about a copper’s library-list. There was a distinct bubbling sensation in the porridge which occupies my brain-pan; something had been said which meant something, you see, but I couldn’t quite nail it to the counter. Something about intimate possessions. Fellworthy had wanted them. Sentimental, you see. My mind’s eye conjured up Bronwen’s room and the little, intimate, sentimental trivia which were still lying about there. Like the hateful, fluffy pink piggy-wig nightie-case and the drawers full of sturdy, sensible knickers. Like the porcelain pussy-cats, silver hair-brush and snapshot-album on her messy dressing-table. Like the Parker pen-set and Florentine leather blotter on her tidy desk. Desk? Yes, and like the two pairs of spectacles on her desk.

‘These, ah, glasses of Mrs Fellworthy’s that her husband seemed so keen on,’ I said idly, ‘I daresay he was glad to have them? I mean, he shed a sentimental tear or two, eh?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No, well we couldn’t find them; everything was a bit squashed up, as I already remarked, and we could only find the case. Quite agitated, he was; asked where the wreck was so he could have a look for himself. I told him the name of the garage but advised him most strenuously not to carry out his intention; the wreckage was copiously, er, stained, you understand, and I begged him not to mar the beautiful memories he cherished of her as a radiant young woman in the bloom of her beauty.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said, voicing my own memories of the living Bronwen, ‘do you think you could be terribly kind and get the garage-proprietor on the phone?’

‘Certainly, sir.’ Bzzz-bzzz, Bzzz-bzzz. ‘Hallo, Mr Duffy? Got an officer here from, er, London, making routine checks on that crunch in the High Street, yeah the lady-don … have a word with him?’

‘Hullo, Mr Duffy, shan’t keep you a moment, just tying up the loose ends before I countersign the DCI’s report’ – I winked apologetically at the DCI – ‘I understand the husband of the deceased driver talked of calling on you to examine the wreckage in person – did he do so?’

‘Yeah. Nasty, miserable bugger he was, too. We told him the wreck had gone off to the crusher that very morning and he made a nasty scene, said I’d no right to demolish his property eckcetra.’

‘And had it, in fact, gone?’

‘Not acksherly, no; it went the next day, but I wouldn’t have let me worst enemy see his wife’s car all sticky and that and the flies so thick you couldn’t hardly get near it.’

‘Well, thanks, Mr Duffy. I’m sure you did the right thing, you’ve obviously got a kind heart.’

‘And he’d have had a sore arse from the end of my boot if he’d gone on ranting and raving at me any longer.’

This picture of Dr Fellworthy by no means agreed with the Inspector’s description of him as an ‘exceedingly pleasant gentleman.’ He might, of course, have been suffering from a delayed reaction which needed venting, or he might be one of those chaps who are civil to senior policemen but a little testy towards garage-proprietors. I myself have been civil to many a copper in my time and have, I grieve to admit, sometimes used language to garage-proprietors which would have raised a few eyebrows in the Cavalry Club itself.

‘Nevertheless,’ I mused inwardly …

‘Nevertheless,’ I mused aloud to the DCI, ‘Fellworthy does seem to have an almost morbid preoccupation with these visual aids of Bronwen’s.’

‘Sentimental, see. He treated her to them last year, the last time they ever went on holiday together.’

‘You mean they were still seeing each other?’

‘Oh, ay. The Channel Islands holiday was probably an attempt at reconciliation, like a second honeymoon; you know, trying to see if the flame of connubial fervour could be rekindled by a touch of the old rumpy-pumpy, see?’

‘Yes, I see,’ I murmured, giving a reflective twirl to the moustachio. ‘And that was the last time he saw her, what?’

‘Well, no; it was the last time they were “together” as they say, but he used to pop up to Oxford once a term, take her out to lunch and that. Nil desperandio seems to have been his motto. She must have been all woman for him to pursue her so doggedly. Tender and true.’

‘Did he happen to mention when he was last in Oxford?’

‘Don’t think so. No, I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘Lend me a bright constable for a couple of hours, could you?’ Within a minute a bright constable clunked in, his eyes shining with pure intelligence. His name was Holmes, which was tough luck on a Detective Constable, and he was put at my disposal.