Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

At last Dryden tottered into the drawing-room and subsided into my personal armchair, gazing benignly at me through a poisonous Limburger haze. (I was rather glad that he had polished off that cheese, for it is not so much a dairy product as an instrument of biological warfare; it has to be kept chained down, and uninitiated guests have been known to ask pointed questions about the drainage system.)

He gazed, as I say, benignly and paid my household many a compliment. (Scone College, you see, is one of the brainier places in Oxford and the food there is correspondingly vile; I have heard that even Balliol dons blench when invited to dine at Scone’s High Table.)

‘Now,’ he said eupeptically, ‘where were we?’

‘We were at a sort of crux, John. First you spoke of two men, then of two lots of two men. I long to know what you can have meant.’

‘Well, Mortdecai, to tell the truth we cannot be quite certain that there was a total of four men, for one of the two pairs may well have been the same as the other two for all we know; you see that, I’m sure?’

‘I am sure that I shall see, just so soon as you have told me all, in a sequential sort of way.’

‘Ah, yes. Well, d’you see, Fred – you remember Fred the Lodge Porter?’

‘He is etched on my memory,’ I replied bitterly. ‘Many an alleged race-horse did he recommend to me in my salad days and most of them ran like alligators in Wellington boots. Yes, I remember Fred all right.’

‘Well, he is now Head Porter, perhaps as a reward for teaching so many young men the perils of the Turf. Be that as it may, soon after Bronwen’s death he asked to see the Domestic Bursar and told him that some days earlier Bronwen had confided in him that she was beginning to suspect that two large men in dark suits were following her.’

‘Wishful thinking?’ I suggested.

‘Just what anyone would have thought, Mortdecai, but Fred had, as it happens, been accosted in the friendliest way by two just such men in the White Horse tavern in the Broad; they treated him to a consolatory pint of ale after he had been narrowly defeated by the reigning champion, whom he had hoped to depose, at a game called shove-the-halfpenny. They encouraged him to gossip about his job and expressed surprise at learning that there was a lady-don at Scone and asked him many a question, plying him with ale. This puzzled him no little, for they were not, he is sure, policemen – chaps of Fred’s kidney can recognise policemen, you know, however plain their clothes.’

‘So can Jock. It is an innate gift.’

‘He afterwards noticed these same men from time to time, loitering at a little distance from the College, sometimes peering into the windows of the bookshop opposite, as though enjoying the reflection of the College gates therein. He notices such things; he has been a servant of the College for many years now, man and boy – and the College pays its porters to keep their eyes open.’

‘Just as we undergraduates used to pay them to keep their eyes shut now and then.’

‘I daresay, it was ever thus. However, when he told Bronwen that he had himself seen two such men frequenting the neighbourhood, “she came,” as he put it, “all over funny” and he took her into the porters’ cubby-hole and gave her a chair and a cup of strong, sweet tea. She was, he says, “sort of pleased and frightened both.”’

‘That’s easily explained, surely: she was frightened that she was indeed being followed but pleased that the men were real, not mere figments of her heated imagination. You see, women of a certain age live in dread of menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes and hallucinations.’

‘Yes, that seems plausible, I must say. How I wish I had your wonderfully experienced insight into the minds of women; it would help me so much with the Brontë sisters.’ I mentally sorted out some two or three rejoinders to that one but decided to let it lie where it had fallen. (Even had I skill with words I should not care to bandy them with Dryden; he once bandied several whole sentences with Bowra himself and emerged bloody but uncowed. His command of the subjunctive mood is a by-word in Oxford – for my part I never quite mastered the locative case.)

‘As to the other two men,’ he went on, placing his fingertips together so as to form a little churchlet, ‘I have already hinted, have I not, that we cannot assume that they were the same as the first two, although they, too, were large and clad in dark suits …’

‘Yes, John?’ I asked patiently, helpfully. His thoughts seemed to be far away. I brought the port decanter in and set it before him. He seemed to collect himself after the first sip or two.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘the other two men – if they were indeed other – presented themselves at Scone the day after Bronwen shuffled off her mortal coil and showed the Warden some most impressive credentials. He is unable clearly to recollect the origin of these documents; I questioned him clearly but all he could swear to was that the men’s authority appeared to come from the Ministry of Certain Things. I fancy he was jesting. He is, as you know, a Constitutional Historian by trade and much blessed with children: such men live in a world quite different from ours, quite different.’

I took a little port myself, to ease the throbbing in my temples.

‘The Warden,’ he continued, ‘was enough impressed by these credentials to give the men permission to rummage Bronwen’s set of rooms. They took away a suitcase full of her papers. The Junior Dean accepted what I would call a wholly inadequate receipt, written on plain paper and illegibly signed … oh dear, yes, I quite agree, Mortdecai (although the phrase you use is strange to me), but we must be charitable; after all, if he were clever he would hardly be Junior Dean, would he? Eh?’

I repeated the phrase which he had found strange.

‘One thing he did notice, though, was that one of the men spoke with a curious accent – American, he thought, or perhaps Australian or Swedish. Fred, alas, was not on duty in the Lodge that day so we cannot tell whether these latter two men were the same as the two he had met in the tavern, you see.’

‘I see, I see,’ I said, choking back another strange phrase, for the news about Fred’s absence was the answer to a shrewd question with which I had been about to hit Dryden. No-one likes to have his shrewd questions stillborn behind his front teeth.

‘Are you quite well, Mortdecai? Shall I continue? Splendid. Now, you were about to ask me about Fred, were you not’ – I ground a molar or two inaudibly – ‘and then you were going to ask me to come to the point, to explain why the Fellworthy incident should be of sufficient import to impel the Second Senior Fellow of Scone across the foaming flight-paths to Jersey.’

‘Some such thought did cross my mind, John,’ I said heavily. ‘I mean, even lady-dons have secret lives and strange accidents, statistics prove it …’ He checked my flow of reason with an upraised finger far more minatory than I could ever command.

‘Mortdecai, you surely recall that I was never one to use words at haphazard. I did not say “accident.” I used the word “incident” choicely. The Warden and I are convinced that Bronwen’s final, ah, occident – an elegant compromise, wouldn’t you say? – was, not to put too fine a point upon it, bloody murder.’

I turned that word over and looked at the back of it. There was no solace on that side. I sipped a sup of second-best port; that, too, was thick and sweet as blood. Into each life some murder must fall but too much has fallen in mine – it follows me about like some blue-arsed fly but I have never learnt to live with it. Murder is for the younger set.