Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

‘I mean like I dunno. She rung up yesterday from the Continong – France or Egypt or one of them places – asked after me health.’

‘And mine, too, no doubt?’

‘Well, not exackly, Mr Charlie. She only asked if you’d tidied up your face yet and I said I cooden say. I forget what else she said.’

‘I’ll bet you do,’ I thought.

‘Mind you, it isn’t half coming on a treat, Mr Charlie.’ I smirked.

‘That’s if you like having a soup-strainer hanging from your moosh.’ I un-smirked.

Take my word for it, the best way to get a really good dinner is to share your thug’s personal little smackerel. We kicked off with as much Beluga caviar as a fashionable Jersey dentist could earn in an hour; then, since Jock had inadvertently made far too much toast, it seemed only sensible to open a half-kilo tin of Johanna’s Strasbourg Pâté de Foie Gras Truffé. Having refreshed our palates with a couple of sorbets from the deep-freeze, we made shift to stay our stomachs with a tossed endive salad, helped down with a few slices of cold roast sirloin … but there; I must not weary you with humdrum details of our scratch indoor picnic for I am sure that you agree with me in deploring those who live for creature comforts.

The late-night movie was a bonus; Powell and Pressburger’s lovely 49th Parallel. Add a third bottle of Antiquary Scotch and you can well imagine that it was a tired, replete and happy Mortdecai who tottered to his blameless couch, moulting canaries and absentee wives quite forgotten for the nonce.

I shall not pretend that I awoke with a song on my lips, for I detest falsehood, but there is no doubt that, as Jock came clinking in with the tea-tray – he had selected the fortifying Earl Grey – the world seemed a ripe and juicy one. As he flung open the curtains the Jersey sun battered cheerily at the windows and I went so far as to ask Jock to open them wide. Ever thoughtful, he had placed a pair of sun-glasses on the tray; he thinks of everything.

‘Did you remember to make an appointment for me with Mr Bates?’ I asked confidently as the healing brew trickled in amongst my red corpuscles.

‘Yeah, ’course. Said he could fit you in right after lunch. Two-fifteen. Gives you nice time to get over to St Helier for the dentist.’

‘Dentist?’ I quavered – the sun seemed to go into an eclipse – ‘How do you mean, “dentist”? I gave no orders about dentists.’

‘Madam did,’ he said smugly. ‘You remember; she booked you in for a check-up twice a year and today’s the day. Yeah, that’s it, now I remember what she said on the phone, what I cooden remember last night. She said to make sure you didn’t forget and then she sort of laughed a bit.’ He coaxed another cup of tea into my nerveless fingers.

‘Don’t fret, Mr Charlie, ’sonly a check-up, he probably won’t even use the drill, let alone the pliers.’ When it comes to comforting, Job’s buddies could profit from Jock’s correspondence course. ‘An’ your usual is by your gloves on the hall-table.’ Splendid chap, he’d remembered that I make a practice of chewing a clove of garlic just before visiting fashionable dentists: it cuts down your time in the torture-chair amazingly. Try it.

Mr Bates, the orthoptist, greeted me with his usual benign smile; he had the knack of making you feel that your visit has made his day. He would have made an excellent bishop; one of the good, old-fashioned sort that believes in God, you remember.

‘Well, now,’ he said, after we’d exchanged felicities, ‘how can I help you? Been sitting on your frames again? Or do you need something a little stronger for reading? You shouldn’t yet, you know, if you’ve been doing the eye-exercises I showed you.’

‘I’m afraid it’s a bit more serious than that, Mr Bates.’

‘Oh dear, that’s most surprising; as I recall, last year you had normal presbyopia for a man of your age and, let me see, a little astigmatism in the left eye. Come into the office and let’s have a look, shall we?’ In the office I showed him my temporary warrant-card and begged him – quite unnecessarily – to keep mum. Then I showed him the leather case.

‘Goodness, yes; I remember this well, it was a very special order indeed. It isn’t often we’re asked for quite such a luxurious pair, even in Jersey. Yes, and I remember suggesting to her husband that it might be a good idea to put her middle initial on the case … I mean, “B.F.” by itself … yes, I have the name now: Fellworthy. She came to see me complaining of headaches and wanted to know whether her spectacles were causing the trouble. Poor woman, I found she had very high astigmatism in both eyes, combined with spherical errors different in each eye. Let me just get out her card. Hmm; yes, indeed. The astigmatism had not deteriorated, of course – it doesn’t, you know – but she needed stronger “spheres” on both eyes and I so prescribed.

‘Two minutes after she’d left, her husband came in again and said that he wanted to surprise her with something very de luxe and in high fashion: he particularly fancied those enormous circular lenses …’ I took the wrecked specs out of the case and handed them to him. ‘Yes, these are they, and I remember warning him that the cost …’ His words withered away. You know how opticians, when handed a pair of glasses, hold them a few inches from their own eyes and move them back and forth? Mr Bates was doing just that when he broke off his sentence. His face went grey and, for the first time in our acquaintance, the benign smile vanished from his face.

‘What in the name of …?’ he began; then turned the glasses to a vertical position and looked through the unbroken lens again. His look of shock changed to one of grim anger.

‘Some infernal idiot has rotated this lens through ninety degrees,’ he said, controlling his voice with an effort. ‘What madman—’

‘Er, no chance, I suppose, that the lens could have got loose and sort of wobbled itself round?’

‘Positively not. And to wobble , as you put it, through precisely ninety degrees – that would be far too much of a coincidence.’

‘Sorry, silly of me.’

‘No-one could shift those lenses a tenth of a millimetre without using …’ – he snatched up a jeweller’s loupe from his desk and screwed it into his eye – ‘… yes, look here!’ I took the loupe and looked. ‘Do you see the two tiny gold screws which clamp the rims onto the lenses? Look carefully, they’re burred and scratched where someone has loosened them and then tightened them again; do you see the two sets of scratches?’ I saw.

‘Mr Bates,’ I said soberly, ‘what would be the effect on Mrs Fellworthy if she unsuspectingly put on these glasses while she was driving a car in traffic?’ He thought carefully for a while, evidently trying to phrase his answer into the kind of layman’s language which even I would understand.

‘Try to imagine,’ he said at last, ‘that you are far too close to one of those huge, curved CinemaScope screens, watching a film of a motor-race. Then imagine that you are also standing on your head with your eyes crossed and blind drunk. That, roughly speaking, would be the effect. You would think that the world, or you yourself, had gone insane. If there was strong sunshine, the darkening of the lenses would make it even worse. You would, in short, be more frightened than you’d ever been in your life; the steadiest man in the world would, I should think, panic uncontrollably.’ He touched the crumpled frames with gentle finger-tips. ‘Is that what happened to …?’