Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

‘You will be delighted to hear, Dr Fellworthy,’ I said, dipping into my coat pocket, ‘that we have managed to retrieve the spectacles of your late wife.’

His hand darted towards the glasses-case like a peckish python towards a passing bunny-rabbit. ‘How can I ever begin to thank you, gentlemen!’ he yarooped, grabbing the case from me. His top pocket lurched forward and swallowed it up. He glanced at his gold wrist-watch. ‘Now, if you’ll forgive me, gentlemen, I could go on chatting like this all day’ —he motioned us towards the door we had only just entered— ‘but I must return to my work. Most grateful indeed.’

As he motioned us out, a dreadful noise emerged from the door marked “SURGERY.” It sounded as though a water-buffalo were breaking wind after being force-fed Lentil Surprise. It was followed by an equally dreadful clatter.

‘Anyone else in the building with you, sir?’ asked Holmes, getting straight to the point.

‘It must be … a kiwi fruit,’ he replied, his old twitch reasserting itself.

Holmes raised an eyebrow, allowed it a quick flutter around his forehead, then lowered it back into place once again. ‘You employ a kiwi fruit to oversee the washing-up, do you, sir? I believe they can be most effective,’ he said, ‘for all but the most stubborn household stains.’

‘No, officer. I employ kiwi fruit only for purposes of experimentation. It is my area. I used to lead the world in testing cosmetics on animals; but there’s little call for it now. I had to release two hundred and fifty rabbits back into the wild, all done up to the nines. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

The door closed firmly behind us, followed by the unmistakable sound of chains being re-hooked. Cautiously, I looked through the spy-hole once again; once again, another eye looked back. ‘Mission accomplished,’ I murmured to Holmes. ‘Let us to the car.’

‘B-b-but, sir!’ exclaimed Holmes. ‘We can’t let him go without a bloody good bollocking! He’s guilty as dammit, sir!’

‘To the car, Holmes!’ I thundered.

With Holmes’s mutterings ringing in my ears, I drove approximately two hundred yards before taking a sharp right down a farm-track, ploughing through the odd sheep and lodging the car firmly behind a hedge. ‘We will continue on foot, Holmes,’ I said. ‘Follow me!’

We charted an uncharted route across a muddy field. Mud! My feet have never enjoyed rubbing shoulders with mud, particularly mud as pushy and clingy as this. However hard I tried, I simply could not shake it off. But if life has taught me anything it is this: there comes a time when we must all slop through mud in order to arrive at a hideous bungalow.

At the far side of the field, we peered through a hedge into the garden at the rear of the Fellworthy lodging. There was little decoration in the garden, only a tree-like metallic washing-line, upon which what appeared to be fifty or sixty ear-muffs were blowing in the wind. But Holmes, it proved, had sharper eyes than I.

‘Blimey, sir!’ he gasped. ‘Just look at ’em.’

‘Who would want so many ear-muffs, Holmes? Is the man a pansy?’

‘They’re not ear-muffs, sir. They’re … hamsters.’

‘Hamsters? What sort of monster would air his dead hamsters in public like that?’

‘Who said anything about dead? Look, sir, lick your finger – there’s no wind. Those hamsters are bloody wriggling !’

Personally, I have nothing whatsoever against the hamster community. But to crawl up a washing-line, prise open a peg and hang oneself out to dry struck me as the action of a half-wit.

‘Shall we rescue ’em, sir?’ hissed Holmes.

‘Rescue them?’

‘The hamsters, sir. My sister used to have one. Answered to the name of Sandy.’

‘DC Holmes,’ I said, pulling vigorously on my moustache. ‘We are conducting a murder investigation. We are not Mr Steven McQueen on his scooter in The Great Escape . Look lively, man!’

At a pre-arranged sign – a kick in the shins – Holmes nipped under the hedge and across the lawn. He came to a halt by the north wall of the bungalow, crossed his hands and bent forward ready for me to join him. I took a running jump onto said hands and – whuuup! – pulled myself up onto the roof of the bungalow. I then leant over and, with great difficulty, helped Holmes up beside me.

A peek upwards while Fellworthy was making his lunge for the faux specs had alerted me to the fact that the bungalow was blessed with a skylight, running from one end of the roof to the other. Stealthily, Holmes and I now looked down through this skylight onto the strange scene below. Dr Fellworthy was sitting on the leather sofa in his sitting-room, bent over a long table, a solid if somewhat folksy affair constructed of oak and metal with a raffia inlay. Whenever he moved his head to the side, the glasses which Mr Bates had gone to so much trouble to recreate would swing into our view beside their olive-green crushed Morocco case on the table. What was he doing with them? Did his intense interest in them mean that we had judged him unjustly, and that the fellow really did have an emotional yearning for their safe return?

Others might say that the Mortdecai heart is made of flint. I would deny it most strenuously. Flint indeed! Flint is far too fragile: granite, I think, is much more the material. But even my granite heart came close to breaking as I glimpsed the scene below me: the ageing doctor, pining for his deceased spouse, mournfully toying with his fondest memento of her. Glancing across the skylight at Holmes, I noticed that he, too, had a look of profound remorse skateboarding this way and that over his face. How could we have misjudged that poor medic so?

While Holmes’s bulky sleeve gave chase to a runaway tear, Fellworthy walked out of the sitting-room, leaving the glasses and their case on the table. Seconds later, he returned with a plastic bag in one hand and a mallet in the other. Almost to our astonishment, he then placed the specs in the plastic bag, raised the mallet above his head, and with five well-placed blows, smashed them to smithereens. Without a second glance, he then transported the bag and its contents to a waste-paper basket, returned the mallet to its home, and poured himself a glass of Armagnac.

‘Blimey, sir,’ sighed Holmes. ‘He took agin those specs, didn’t he, sir? Would you say he’s acting like a man who’s got nothing to hide?’

‘I fancy those hamsters could tell us a tale or two, Holmes. But I have a trick up my—’

‘AND THERE IT SHALL REMAIN! HANDS IN THE AIR, GENTLEMEN!’ An unfamiliar voice – half man, half woman, half speak-your-weight machine – barked behind us. We turned around, hands in the air. But the owner of the voice was all too familiar.

‘Petal!’ exclaimed Holmes. Before us stood the monstrous, huge-bosomed policewoman upon whom I had first set eyes in the cop-shop in Bucks. With a few wires attached and the odd burst of helium up her arse, she might have found more remunerative employment as a barrage-balloon. Performing a hand-stand on a grassy knoll in a city centre, she would have been a dead cert for an RIBA gold medal. But for the moment, she was pointing a double-barrelled shotgun at us.

‘Petal, love, what are you doin’ here?’ Holmes spoke to her in one of those soft, kindly, caring voices that policemen reserve for overweight madwomen bearing shotguns. ‘Come on, love, put that down, love, there must be some mistake, let’s talk it over, you’re suffering from stress, too much on your plate, think of the kiddies …’

‘Shut it, Holmes!’ Petal bellowed back, giving him a hefty sock to the jaw with one of her spade-like hands. Holmes’s face blew up something rotten. Within seconds, it looked as though a pair of fuller-figured jelly-fish were fornicating all over it.