The Mortdecai Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

said I’d been knocked down by a motor car the Insurance would buy me a new suit. This completed the cure and I got on to the brokers straight away, for my no-claims bonus is just a dream of childhood now. There’s nothing like a little insurance to smooth the troubled brow, take my word for it. Meanwhile, Jock sent the porter’s little girl to Prunier in a taxi for a box of luncheon
à porter
. There was a dear little turbot
soufflé
, a
Varieté Prunier
(six oysters, each cooked a different way) and two of their
petits pots de crême de chocolat
.
    I had a nap and awoke much mollified and spent a useful afternoon with my ultra-violet machine and a grease crayon, mapping the passages of repaint (‘strengthening’ as we call it in the trade) on a gorgeous panel by – well, more or
less
by – the Allunno di Amico di Sandro. (God bless Berenson, I say.) Then I wrote a few paragraphs of my paper for
Burlington Magazine
in which I shall prove, once and for all, that the Tallard Madonna in the Ashmolean is by Giorgione after all, and despite that awful man Berenson.
    Dinner was pork chops with the kidneys in and chips and beer. I always send Jock out for the beer in a jug and make him wear a cloth cap. It seems to taste better and he doesn’t mind a bit. They won’t serve the porter’s little girl, you see.
    After dinner Mrs Spon arrived with lots of samples of gimp and bobbles and crétonnes for cushion covers and things and pink mosquito netting for the standing drapes round my bed. I had tobe firm about the netting, I must admit it was rather lovely but I insisted that it should be blue-for-a-boy. I mean, I have my little ways but I’m not a deviate, for God’s sake, am I, I asked her.
    She was already just a little cross when Martland arrived and loomed in the doorway like a pollution problem. Diffidently, for him, but definitely doomlike.
    They admitted, grudgingly, that they knew each other by sight. Mrs Spon flounced over to the window. I know lots of men who can flounce but Mrs Spon is the last woman who can do it. There was a sticky sort of silence of the sort which I relish. Finally Martland whispered, ‘Perhaps you should ask the old doxy to leave’ in just too loud a whisper.
    Mrs Spon rounded on him and Told Him Off. I had heard of her talents in that direction but had never before been privileged to hear her unlock the word bag. It was a literary and emotional feast: Martland withered visibly. There is no one like your gently nurtured triple-divorcee for really putting the verbal leather in. ‘Wart on the tax-payer’s arse,’ ‘traffic-warden’s catamite,’ and ‘poor man’s Colonel Wigg’ are just a few of the good things she served up but there was more – much more. She swept out at last, in a cloud of ‘
Ragazza
’ and lovely epithets. She was wearing a suede knickerbocker suit but you’d have sworn she twitched a twelve-foot train of brocade away from Martland as she passed him.
    ‘Golly,’ he said when she’d gone.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, happily.
    ‘Well. Well, look, Charlie, what I really came to say was how sick and sorry I am about all this.’
    I gave him my cold look. The big, economy size.
    ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘you’ve had a filthy rotten time and I think you’re owed an explanation. I want to put you in the picture – which will give you a bit of a whip-hand, I don’t mind telling you – and er ask your er help.’
    ‘Gor blimey,’ I thought.
    ‘Sit down,’ I said, frigidly. ‘I myself prefer to stand, for reasons which will occur to you. I shall certainly listen to your explanations and apologies; beyond that I can make no promises.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. He fidgeted a little, like a man who is expecting to be offered a drink and thinks you’ve forgotten to do the honours.When he realized that it was definitely Temperance Night for him he resumed.
    ‘Do you know why Spinoza was shot this morning?’
    ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I said boredly, although a