The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery Read online

  Cult classics since their first publication in the UK in the 1970s, the Mortdecai novels, with their “rare wit and imaginative unpleasantness,” (Julian Barnes) are a series of dark-humored and atmospheric crime thrillers featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai: degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and experienced self-avowed coward.

  In the final novel of the series, Charlie (and his intrepid moustache) is invited to Oxford to investigate the cruel and most definitely unusual death of a don who collided with a bus. Though her death appears accidental, one or two things don’t add up—such as two pairs of thugs who’d been following her just before her death. With more spies than you could shoehorn into a stretch limo and the solving of the odd murder along the way, THE GREAT MORTDECAI MOUSTACHE MYSTERY is a criminally comic delight.

  Also by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  available from The Overlook Press

  Don’t Point That Thing at Me

  After You With the Pistol

  Something Nasty in the Woodshed

  All the Tea in China

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © The Estate of Kyril Bonfiglioli, 1999

  Chapter XX © Craig Brown, 1999

  All rights reserved

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1293-5

  Contents

  Also by Kyril Bonfiglioli available from The Overlook Press

  Copyright

  I: A pair of knaves for openers

  II: A queen, a one-eyed jack and a wild card

  III: Queen high backs into the game

  IV: Never draw to a pair of deuces

  V: Two high pairs

  VI: Mortdecai turns over his hole-card

  VII: Dealer folds

  VIII: An open-ended straight

  IX: Player draws two aces

  X: Player calls for a fresh deck

  XI: Dealer suspects readers

  XII: Dealer’s choice: seven-card stud

  XIII: Dealer’s choice: seven-card stud. Again.

  XIV: Dead man’s hand

  XV: Ignorant end of the straight

  XVI: Red queen busts the flush

  XVII: A natural straight to the knave

  XVIII: Dealer shows his hand

  XIX: Second red queen shows

  XX: Third queen books a loser

  XXI: Full house, kings on queens

  About the Author

  From An Envoi to a Projected Work

  And patiently, O Reader, I thee pray,

  Take in good part this work as it is meant,

  And grieve thee not with ought that I shall say,

  Since with good will this book abroad is sent,

  To tell men how in youth I did assay

  What love did mean and now I it repent:

  That musing me my friends might well beware.

  And keep them free from all such pain and care.

  I

  A pair of knaves for openers

  Trust me that honist man is as comen a name as the name of a good felow, that is to say a dronkerd, a tauerne hanter, a riotter, a gamer, a waster: so are among the comen sort al men honist men that are not knowin for manifest naughtye knaues.

  —Sir Thomas Wyatt in a letter to his son

  ‘I wooden, Mr Charlie, I reelly wooden,’ mumbled Jock, moodily gnashing his toothsome way through the bunch of grapes he had brought me. ‘I mean, you know the aggro you’re going to get if you try to complete that projeck, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

  I was, you see, in what Jock calls ‘horse-piddle’ – what you and I would call ‘King Edward the Fifth’s Hospital for Officers Who Cannot Afford the London Clinic’ – and was recovering from a trifling operation which is none of your business. (Oh, very well, if you must know, I had been there to have a cluster of haemorrhoids beheaded, which was one good reason for having no appetite for grapes. The other good reason was that I don’t happen to like grapes, a fact well known to Jock.)

  Perhaps I should explain that I have a Fully Comprehensive Accident Protection Policy which guarantees that if anyone even looks as though he’s going to be horrid to me he will be cured of all known disease. Permanently. The Policy’s name is Jock.

  Jock, in short, is my large, dangerous, one-fanged, one-eyed thug: we art-dealers need to keep a thug, you understand, although it isn’t always easy to persuade HM’s Commissioners for Inland Revenue that it’s a necessary expense. Jock is the best thug that money can buy; he’s quality all through, slice him where you will. When I decided to conserve my energy resources – who’d want to become fossil fuel? – and gave up art-dealing in favour of matrimony I tried to pay him off but he just sort of stayed on and took to calling himself a manservant. He is not quite sane and never quite sober but he can still pop out seven streetlights with nine shots from his old Luger while ramming his monstrous motorbike through heavy after-theatre traffic. I’ve seen him do it. As a matter of fact, I was on the pillion-seat at the time, whimpering promises to God that if He got me home safely I would never tell another lie. God kept His part of the deal, but God isn’t an art-dealer, is He? (Don’t answer that.)

  Ah yes, well, I’ve introduced both God and Jock so I’d better start tidily by putting on record that my name is The Honble. Charlie Mortdecai. I was actually christened Charlie; I suspect that my mother was getting at my father in some unsubtle way, she was like that. He wouldn’t have noticed, he wasn’t good at jokes.

  Yes, well again, there I was, in my valuable hospital bed, tossing back little shots of Chivas Regal from the bottle-cap while Jock tore juicily at the bunch of grapes already cited, which had camouflaged the top of the paper bag in which he had brought me the booze. Pray do not think that Jock had no stomach for the Scotch; he, too, dearly loves such fluids but would have been shocked if I had offered him a suck at the Chivas R., for he knows his station in life. He was, in any case, more concerned to persuade me from the perilous venture upon which I was embarking.

  ‘Honestly, Mr Charlie,’ he pleaded on, ‘don’t do it, I beg of you. It’s bloody madness, you know it is.’ He paced to the open window, sprayed a moody mouthful of grape-stones into the welkin and returned to my well-smoothed counterpane. ‘Playing with bleeding fire, that’s what you’re doing, Mr Charlie.’

  ‘Enough, Jock!’ I commanded, raising a commanding head. ‘I am touched by your concern for my personal safety but my mind is made up. I shall go through with this, come what may. I must strike a blow for the free world while I still have my strength.’ My commanding hand strayed to the subject of our debate: the already thriving thicket of vegetation which sprouted from the Mortdecai upper lip.

  My ravishing wife, Johanna, you see, had taken the opportunity of my hospitalisation to nip across the Atlantic Ocean and pay a call on her terrifying old mama, the Gräfin or gryphon Grettheim and I too had seized an opportunity; viz., to grow a moustache, thus fillin
g a much-needed gap between the southern end of the nose and the northern ditto of the mouth. It was prospering well although it tickled a bit – indeed, no fewer than two of the nurses had assured me that it tickled quite deliciously. I had often longed for such a thing – yes, the moustache – and was devoting all my energies to it. Meditation and a high-protein diet work best, you may take my word for it.

  ‘Well, Mr Charlie, I daresay you know best,’ said Jock in glum tones which belied his words, ‘but I wooden be in your shoes for anythink when Madam gets back.’ With that he pulled the now stripped stalk of the grape-bunch from his pursed lips, looking for all the world like some conjurer extracting a small Christmas tree from a rabbit’s backside, and rose gloomily to his great feet. I raised a brace of benign fingers and promised that no blame would attach to him; I would assure Johanna that he had fought the good fight.

  ‘By the way, Jock, was it you who kindly bought those delicious grapes for me?’

  ‘Yeah. ’Course. Well, I put them on your account at Fortnum’s, didden I? They weren’t half expensive. Very tasty though.’

  ‘Yes. They sounded tasty indeed.’

  ‘Well, I got to go, Mr Charlie, got a mate coming round to play dominoes.’

  ‘Splendid, it will keep you off the streets. Enjoy yourself. Having any trouble with the new lock on the liquor-cupboard?’

  He left in a huffed sort of way. I fished out the pocket-mirror to see what progress the moustache had made since lunch-time, then rang for a nurse.

  During my last few days in hospital nothing much happened. Jock continued to smuggle in my whisky-ration; young nurses sneaked into my room for a tot when the senior nurses weren’t administering shaming enemas; the Senior Consultant – a chum of mine – popped into the room to scrounge a tot himself (poor underpaid wretch, he probably had to drink cooking-sherry at home) and to urge me to give up drinking and smoking lest I should contract Art-Dealer’s Elbow; birds jabbered outside the window at dawn (when do the bloody things sleep?); and colour television made the evenings hideous. I applied for permission to have my canary brought in but it was rated a health-hazard, so my studious brain applied itself to nurse-watching. I soon had them scientifically classified by plumage, habitat and ethology, as follows: the elderly, ugly ones in moult, whose only pleasure was the administration of cruel enemas to the root of the trouble, so to say, and who sniffed like aunts when they caught a whiff of whisky on my breath; the Roman Catholic ones whose characteristic cry was ‘You may stop that at once or I’ll tell Sister;’ the very brightly-plumaged ones who chirruped ‘Ooh, you are awful;’ and the almost-pretty ones who only said ‘Oooh!’

  Time passed slowly and my moustache inched forth so languidly that I sometimes feared that it was losing its sense of purpose in life – but there came a day when certain tubes were uncoupled from undignified bits of the Mortdecai chassis and I was told that I might navigate to the lav under my own steam. As I tottered thither in an imperious dressing-gown I could not but notice an uncommon number of junior nurses loitering in the corridor and, it seemed to me, suppressing maidenly titters. A few minutes later I realised why.

  Whimpering, I was helped back to bed while squadrons of ward-maids, helpless with happy laughter, moved into the lav with mops and buckets. Later – much later – I felt proud to have brought a little sunshine into the drab lives of those underpaid little angels of mercy; but for the time being I sulked.

  Soon, though, all wounds were healed and I received my Honourable Discharge from the very Matron herself; she said, pronouncing the capital letters sonorously, that I had made a Splendid Recovery and that she heard On All Sides that I had been a Good Patient. She also hoped that I had Learnt my Lesson and would not, in future, come into contact with Damp Grass, which she assured me was the ætiology of the common or garden haemorrhoid. I started to explain that, if she was right, then the piles would have manifested themselves on my knees and elbows, but she gave me an Odd Look. I suspected that she was just hanging about in the hope of a handsome tip but I’m sure you can’t tip Matrons less than a tenner, and in any case I knew that she probably owned shares in the lazar-houses and would get her slice from the dripping roast as soon as I had paid my bill, so I stayed my generous hand.

  Jock had a swansdown cushion waiting for me in the Rolls – he had a wonderful grasp of the fundamental necessities of life, bless him.

  II

  A queen, a one-eyed jack and a wild card

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek

  With naked foot stalking in my chamber,

  I have seen them gentle tame and meek

  That now are wild and do not remember

  That sometime they put themselves in danger

  To take bread at my hand; and now they range

  Busily seeking with a continual change.

  Back at the Mortdecai half-mansion in the North of the Island – sorry, I thought you knew I lived in Jersey, Channel Islands – I was convalescing splendidly, mounted on cushionry of the finest and downiest, kneading Pomade Hongroise into the fruiting vineyard of my upper lip and applying a little Cognac internally, when the door flew open and a radiant Johanna (to wit, my wife) burst into the room and sprang rapturously into my arms, uttering many a glad cry – only to recoil instantly, giving bent to one of those shrieks which only the gently-nurtured can command and then only when they find their mouths full of well-pomaded moustache. I have never quite known what the word ‘eldritch’ means but there is no reasonable doubt in my mind that eldritch is what that shriek was. No Sabine woman would have got into the quarter-finals that afternoon.

  There followed what I can only call an Ugly Scene. She began temperately enough by saying that the Surgeon General of the USA had specifically warned the public against such defilements and that he could call on the support of most of the sterner prophets in the Old Testament. I put it to her logically that whereas I had freely given her my heart, soul, other assorted organs and all my worldly goods, I had never put anything in writing about my upper lip, had I? This reasonable argument did not sway her at all – women use a different logic from men, you must have noticed that – and she redoubled her Jeremiad, calling my lip-valance a social disease and drawing impassioned parallels with the Watergate cover-up.

  Thinking to silence her into melting, wifely submission I swept her masterfully into my arms. This time it was my turn to recoil with the eldritch shriek as she smartened me up with a gently-nurtured knee in the groin. ‘Don’t you dare to point that thing at me,’ she snarled and, ‘If I ever wish to munch half-grown brambles I shall go and graze in Potter’s Field,’ and again, ‘Go mingle with the pimps in the Place Pigalle, your face looks like a dirty postcard,’ and, ‘You look as though you were going down on an alley-cat.’ Soon afterwards, bitter words were being exchanged. Finally she clicked open the diamond-studded cover of her Patek Philippe watch and said coldly, ‘As of this moment you have precisely five minutes in which to shave yourself back into the ecology.’

  I was not going to take that sort of thing from any mere sex-object, least of all the wife of my personal bosom; I folded my arms lordlily and favoured the ceiling with a stony stare. She rang the bell for Jock, who had cowered out of the room at the very onset of the storm.

  ‘Jock,’ she said in a kindly voice, ‘is the lock on my bedroom door oiled; does the key turn freely? Good. Oh, and will you tell the maid to make up Mr Mortdecai’s bed in his dressing-room, please. And I shan’t be down to dinner tonight, I’ll just have something on a tray in my bedroom. Thank you, Jock.’

  ‘Oh really, Johanna, now look here …’ I began.

  ‘I prefer not to look there, thank you. I have already had a hard day. I shall take some light reading to bed with me. Like the airline timetable.’

  It was the cook’s night off – it almost always is these days, isn’t it? – so when I strolled into the kitchen for a reconnaissance, it was Jock who was setting a tray-load of delicious dinner for Johanna: a n
ice, thick little filet mignon with sauté mushrooms, grilled and stuffed tomatoes and all ringed about with pommes duchesse such as I never tire of and side-dishes of mangetout peas and Jerusalem artichokes. I rubbed my hands: earth hath not anything to show more fair. ‘Give madam lots of those carminative artichokes, Jock,’ I urged. ‘They’ll do her a power of good.’ He shot me a strange look from his glass eye.

  When he returned from the grocery-round, I asked him casually how Madam was.

  ‘Fine, Mr Charlie. Full of beans.’

  ‘And soon,’ I murmured spitefully, ‘she’ll be full of Jerusalem artichokes too, heh heh! But, more to the point, where is my dinner, eh? Or rather, when, what?’

  ‘That was your dinner, Mr Charlie; Cookie wasn’t expecting Madam back today, was she?’ The saliva which had been so sweetly flooding my mouth instantly took on all the savour of a panther’s armpit. My face, I daresay, grew ashen. Jock was at my side in a twinkling, forcing one of his famous brandy-and-sodas into my nerveless fingers. (The secret of Jock’s famous b-and-s’s is that he makes them without soda: it is a simple skill, easily learnt.) I swallowed the prescription and pulled myself together.

  ‘Very well, Jock, tell me the worst. Have we to send out for fish and chips or, God forbid, to the Pizza Parlour?’

  ‘Well, I got a couple of gammon steaks …’

  ‘Hmph.’

  ‘And some of them French mushrooms what I can’t pronoun the name of and a few eggs …’

  ‘Yes? Go on.’

  ‘And I could sortie up some of them Reform potatoes, cooden I?’

  ‘I do not doubt that you could, but all these kickshaws sound more like a light luncheon than a nourishing dinner for a convalescent. Moreover, I am, as you know, eating for two; this moustache will soon contract beri-beri if it does not get its vitamins. Is there nothing to precede this niggardly repast?’