13

I met him thus:

I crossed a ridge of short broken hills

Like an old lion’s cheek-teeth …

An Epistle

I was awakened by a shot.

Not thrilled? Then I venture to guess that you have never been awakened in that way yourself. For my part I found myself down among the accelerator and brake pedals before I was properly awake, whimpering with terror and groping frantically for the Banker’s Special pistol in its hidey-hole under the seat.

Nothing happened.

I thumbed back the hammer and peeped, wincing, over the edge of the window.

Nothing went on happening.

I looked through the other windows – nothing – and decided that I had dreamed the shot, for my sleep had been illustrated with the dread exploits of Comancheros, Apaches, Quantrill’s guerrillas and other fiends in human shape. I treated myself to another O.O.C.B.S. breakfast, only this time without the steak, ham, hot biscuits or coffee. There were one or two bad moments but I was not sick and the old rapture was soon recaptured and I felt emboldened to step out for un petit promenade hygiénique. As I opened the car door another shot rang out, followed one fifth of a second later by the bang of the car door closing again. There is still nothing wrong with the Mortdecai reaction time.

I listened carefully to my audile memory, recalling the exact noise of the shot.

1. It had not been the unmistakable, explicit BANG of a shotgun

2. Not the vicious CRACK of a small calibre rifle

3. Not the BOOM of a .45 pistol

4. Not the ear-stinging WHAM of a heavy calibre standard rifle, or a magnum pistol fired in your direction

5. Not the terrifying whip-crack WHANG-UP of a high velocity sporting rifle fired towards you, but something of the same nature

6. A sporting rifle, then, but

7. Not fired in the canyon because no echoes and surely

8. Not fired at me – dammit, a Girl Guide couldn’t miss a Rolls Royce with two slowly aimed shots.

My intellect was satisfied that it was some honest rancher smartening up the local coyotes: my body took longer to pacify. I crept back on to the seat and twitched gently for fifteen minutes, nibbling at the rye from time to time. After about a hundred years I heard an old car start up miles away across the desert and chug even further away. I sneered at my craven self.

‘You craven wretch,’ I sneered. Inexplicably, I then fell asleep for another hour. Nature knows, you know.

It was still only nine o’clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen.

It is hard to drive in a cringing position but nevertheless I got the Rolls into its stride and strode across the Staked Plains at a good mile-munching pace. The Staked Plains are not really very exciting, when you’ve seen one Staked Plain you’ve seen them all. I particularly don’t want to tell you where Krampf’s rancho is – perhaps was now – but I don’t mind admitting that it lay two hundred straightish miles from my overnight bivouac and between the Sacramento Mountains and the Rio Hondo. Just names on a map that morning, the poetry all gone. There’s nothing like gunfire to drive the glamour from words. I soon became tired of the creosote bushes, desert willows and screw-beams, not to mention the eternal, giant cacti, so different from the ones Mrs Spon grows in her conservatoilette.

I entered New Mexico at noon, still unmolested, still feeling old and dirty. At Lovington (named after old Oliver Loving who blazed the fearful Goodnight-Loving trail in ’66 and died along it of arrow wounds the following year) I had a bath, a shave, a change of raiment and a dish of Huevos ‘Ojos de Comanchero,’ which sounded lovely. In reality it was the most terrifying sight I had seen to date: two fried eggs decorated with ketchup, Tabasco and chopped chillis in the semblance of a pair of bloodshot eyes – I would as soon have eaten my own leg. I waved the grimly thing away; Old Oklahoma Cattlemen are one thing, but these were merely tetrous. I tried, instead, ‘Chilli ’n’ Franks’ which proved to be rather good, just like chilli con carne but with dear little salty bangers instead of the ground meat. While I ate, various admiring peons were handwashing the Rolls, with soap ’n’ water only, of course.

With a bare hundred miles to go, clean, dapper and now only middle-aged again, I pointed the Rolls’ nose toward the Ranch of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, where I would lay down my pilgrim’s scrip of care, my cockle-hat of fear and my staff of illegality; where, moreover, I would take delivery of a great deal of money and perhaps kill a Krampf. Or perhaps not. I had left England prepared to keep my part of the bargain with Martland, but I had thought a great deal during those hundreds of remorseless American miles and had evolved certain arguments against keeping faith with him. (We had never been friends at school after all, for he was the house tart, and known to one and all as ‘Shagnasty’: not for nothing does a boy acquire such a name.)

I had also bought a denser pair of sunglasses; my old ones were calculated for the lemonade-like rays of the English sun and were no proof against the brutal onslaught of the desert light. Even the shadows, razor edged, purple and green, were painful to look at. I drove with all windows shut and the side blinds drawn across: the inside of the Rolls was like an ill-regulated sauna bath but this was better than letting in the dry, scorching fury of the air outside. I was soon sitting in a distressful swamp of sweat and my old wound started to trouble me; chilli ’n’ trepidation were playing the devil with my small intestines and my borborigmus was often louder than the engine of the Rolls, which loped on undeterred, quietly guzzling its pint of petrol per statute mile.

By mid-afternoon I was alarmed to notice that I had stopped sweating and had started talking to myself – and was listening. It was becoming difficult to distinguish the road amongst the writhing pools of heat-haze and I could not tell whether the scraggy-feathered road-runners were under my wheels or a furlong ahead of me.

Half an hour later I was on a dirt road under a spur of the Sacramento range, lost. I stopped to consult the map and found myself listening to the enormous silence – ‘that silence where the birds are dead yet something singeth like a bird’.

From somewhere above me a shot was fired, but there was no sound of a bullet passing and I had no intention of cringing twice in one day. Moreover, there was no mistaking the nature of the firearm, it was the wholesome bark, flattened by the heavy air, of a large calibre pistol loaded with black powder. High on the ridge above me was a horseman waving a broad brimmed hat and already starting to descend with casual mastery of – and disregard for – his mount. Her mount, as it turned out, and what a mount. iQue caballo! I knew what it was immediately, although I had never before seen the true bayo naranjado – the vivid orange dun with a pure white mane and tail. It was entire – no one, surely, could geld a horse like that – and came down the ragged rock slope as though it were Newmarket Heath. The low-horned, double-girthed Texas saddle was enriched with silver conchos over intricately tooled and inlaid leathers and the girl herself was dressed like a museum exhibit of Old Texas: low-crowned black Stetson with rattler band and woven-hair storm-strap, bandana with the ends falling almost to the waist, brown Levi’s tucked into unbelievable Justin boots which were themselves tucked into antique silver Spanish stirrups and garnished with Kelly spurs fashioned, apparently, of gold.

She arrived at the foot of the slope in a small avalanche, reins slack, welded to her saddle with fierce thighs, and the stallion took the storm ditch as though it was not there, landing dramatically beside the Rolls in a spatter of stones.

I wound a window down and peered out with a polite expression. I was met with a spray of cheesy foam from the horse’s mouth; it showed me some of its huge yellow teeth and offered to bite my face off, so I wound the window up again. The girl was inspecting the Rolls; as her horse moved forward past the window I found myself staring at a beautiful gunbelt of Mexican work with buscadero holsters, containing a pair of pristine Dragoon-pattern Colts, the paper-cartridge model of the 1840s, with grips by Louis Comfort Tiffany – unmistakable – dating from perhaps twenty years later. She wore them correctly for the Southwest – butts forward, as though for the flashy Border cross-draw or the cavalry twist (much more sensible), and they were not tied down, of course – this was no Hollywood mock-up but a perfect historical reconstruction. (Try mounting or even trotting with pistols in open holsters tied down to your thighs.) From the saddle scabbard protruded, as was only fitting, the butt of a One-in-One-Thousand Winchester repeater.

From hat to horseshoes she must have been worth a fortune as she sat – it gave me a new vision of the uses of wealth – and that was not counting her splendid person, which looked even more valuable. I am not, as you may have guessed, especially keen on commonplace sex, especially with women, but this vision unequivocally stirred my soggy flesh. The silk shirt was pasted to her perfect form with delicate sweat, the Levi’s made no bones about her pelvic delights. She had the perfect round hard bottom of the horsewoman but not the beamy breadth of the girl who started to ride too young.

I emerged from the other side of the car and addressed her across the bonnet – I am just enough of a horseman never to try to make friends with tired stallions on hot days.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said, by way of a talking point.

She looked me up and down. I sucked in my tummy. My face was as blank as I could make it but she knew, she knew. They know, you know.

‘Hi,’ she said. It left me gasping for air.

‘Can you by any chance direct me to the Rancho de los Siete Dolores?’ I asked.

Her bee-stung lips parted, the little white teeth opened a fraction; perhaps it was a sort of smile.

‘What is the old auto worth?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid it’s not for sale, really.’

‘You are stupid. Also overweight. But cute.’ There was a hint of a foreign accent in her voice, but it was not Mexican. Vienna perhaps, perhaps Buda. I asked the way again. She raised the handle of her beautiful quirt to her eyes and scanned the Western horizon. It was one of those quirts with a bit of pierced horn let into the handle: more useful than a telescope in that climate. I began, for the first time, to understand Sacher-Masoch.

‘Go that way right across lots,’ she pointed, ‘the desert is no worse than the road. Follow the bones when you come to them.’

I tried to think of another talking point but something told me she was not much of a chatterbox – indeed, even as I searched for a way to detain her she had flicked the thong of her quirt under the stallion’s belly and was away into the shimmering jumble of baking rock. Well, you can’t win them all. ‘Lucky old saddle,’ I thought.

In twenty minutes I came upon the first of the bones she had spoken of: the bleached skeleton of a Texas Longhorn artistically disposed beside a faint track. Then another and another, until I reached a huge ranch gateway in the middle of nowhere. Its sunbleached crossbar supported a great polychromed Mexican carving of an agonized Madonna and a board hung below into which had been burned the rancho’s brand – two Spanish bits. I wondered whether there was a joke implied and decided that, if there was, it was not of Mr Krampf’s making.

Past the gate the trail was well-defined; the buffalo grass became richer with every furlong and I began to get glimpses of groups of horseflesh crowded under the cottonwoods – Morgans, Palominos, Appaloosas and I don’t know what-all. Occasional riders began to fall in casually behind and beside me: by the time I reached the huge, rambling hacienda itself I was escorted by quite a dozen charro-clad desperadoes, all pretending that I wasn’t there.

The house was astonishingly beautiful, all white columns and porticoes, the outside a maze of green lawns, fountains, patios, flowering agaves and yuccas. The door of a carport rolled itself up unbidden and I gentled the Rolls in, between a Bugatti and a Cord. When I emerged, bags in hand, my escort of bandits had vanished upon some unheard summons and only a small, impertinent boy was visible. He fluted something in Spanish, whisked my luggage away from me and indicated a shady patio, to which I made my way in as elegant a fashion as my tortured trousers would allow.

I sat down on a marble bench, stretched luxuriously and rested my grateful eyes on the statuary half-hidden in the green shade. One statue, more weather-worn than the others, proved to be an ancient and immobile old lady, hands folded in lap, gazing at me incuriously. I leaped to my feet and bowed – she was the kind of woman to whom people would always accord bows. She inclined her head a little. I fidgeted. Clearly, this must be Krampf’s mother.

‘Have I the honour of addressing Mrs Krampf?’ I asked at length.

‘No, Sir,’ she replied in the careful English of the well-taught foreigner, ‘you address the Countess Grettheim.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said, sincerely, for which of us, not being a Krampf, would care to be mistaken for one?

‘Are Mr and Mrs Krampf at home?’ I asked.

‘I could not say,’ she replied serenely. The subject was evidently closed. The silence stretched out beyond the point where I dared do anything about it. If the old lady’s mission in life was to prevent me feeling cosy, she was certainly in fine midseason form – ‘si extraordinairement distinguée’ as Mallarmé used to say, ‘quand je lui dis bonjour, je me fais toujours l’effet de lui dire “merde”’.

I looked at the statues again. There was an excellent copy of the Venus Callipygea, on whose cool marble buttocks my eyes lingered gratefully. Determined not to be flustered, I succeeded so well that my sun-sore eyelids began to droop.

‘Are you not thirsty?’ the old lady suddenly asked.

‘Eh? Oh, well, er – ’

‘Then why do you not ring for a servant?’

She knew bloody well why I did not ring for a servant, the old bitch. I did ring for one then, though, and a strapping hussy appeared wearing one of those blouses – you know, the ones with a sort of drawstring or rip-cord – bearing a tall glass full of something delicious.

I inclined politely toward the Countess before taking the first sip. This, too, proved a mistake, for she gave me a basilisk stare as though I’d said, ‘Cheers, dears.’

It occurred to me that I should tell her my name, so I did and a certain limited thaw set in; clearly, I should have done this before.

‘I am Mr Krampf’s mother-in-law,’ she said suddenly and her toneless voice and impassive face somehow carried words of contempt for people named Krampf. And for people named Mortdecai, too, for that matter.

‘Indeed,’ I said, with just a hint of polite incredulity in my voice.

Nothing happened for some time except that I finished my drink and summoned the courage to ring for another. She already had me summed up as a low-life; I felt she might as well know me for a toper as well.

Later, a barefoot peon crept in and mumbled to her in thick Spanish, then crept out again. After a while she said, ‘My daughter is now in and wishes to see you,’ then closed her parchment eyelids with finality. I was dismissed. As I left the patio I distinctly heard her say, ‘You will have time to couple with her once before dinner, if you are quick.’ I stopped as though I had been shot in the back. C. Mortdecai is not often at a loss for words but a loss is what he was at then. Without opening her eyes she went on – ‘Her husband will not mind, he does not care to do it himself.’

There was still nothing in this for me. I let the words hang reverberating in the still air while I slunk away. A servant fielded me neatly as I entered the house and led me to a small tapestry-hung chamber on the first floor. I sank into the most sumptuous sofa you can imagine and tried to decide whether I was sunstruck or whether the old lady was the family loony.

You will not be surprised, percipient reader, to learn that when the tapestries parted the girl who entered the room was the girl I had seen on the stallion. I, however, was very surprised, for when I had last met Mrs Krampf – in London, two years before – she had been a villainous old boot wearing a ginger wig and weighing in at some sixteen stones. No one had told me that there was a later model.

Retrieving my eyes, which had been sticking out like chapel hat pegs, I started to scramble to my feet, making rather a nonsense of it what with my short legs and the unreasonably deep sofa. Upright at last, and rather cross, I saw that she was wearing what I suppose I shall have to describe as a Mocking Smile. Almost, one could imagine a red, red rose between her Pearly Teeth.

‘If you call me “amigo,”’ I snapped, ‘I shall scream.’ She raised an eyebrow shaped like a seagull’s wing and the smile left her face.

‘But I had no intention of being so, ah, fresh, Mr Mortdecai, nor do I care to ape the speech of these Mexican savages. The pistolero valiente disguise is a whim of my kooky husband’ – she had a wonderfully fastidious way of using Americanisms – ‘and the pistols are something to do with castration complexes: I do not care to understand, I have no interest in Dr Freud and his dirty mind.’

I had her placed now: Viennese Jewess, the loveliest women in the world and the cleverest. I pulled myself together.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Please let us start again. My name is Mortdecai.’ I put my heels together and bowed over her hand; she had the long and lovely fingers of her race and they were as hard as nails.

‘Mine is Johanna. You know my married name.’ I got the impression that she pronounced it as infrequently as possible. She motioned me back into the sofa – all her gestures were beautiful – and stood there, legs astride. Looking up at her from the depths of that bloody sofa was awkward; lowering my gaze I found myself staring at her jean-gripped crotch, fourteen inches from my nose. (I use fourteen in the Borgesian sense of course.)

‘Those are beautiful pistols,’ I said, desperately. She did something astonishingly swift and complicated with her right hand and, simultaneously it seemed, a Tiffany butt was six inches from my face. I took it from her respectfully – look, the Dragoon Colt is over a foot long and weighs more than four pounds: unless you’ve handled one you can’t begin to understand the strength and skill you need to flip it about casually. This was an intimidating young woman.

It was indeed a very beautiful pistol. I spun the cylinder – it was loaded in all chambers but, correctly, one nipple was uncapped for the hammer to ride on. There was much splendid engraving and I was startled to see the initials J.S.M.

‘Surely these did not belong to John Singleton Mosby?’ I asked, awestruck.

‘I think that was his name. A cavalry raider or something of that sort. My husband never tires of telling how much he paid for them – for myself, I forget, but it seemed an excessive amount.’

‘Yes,’ I said, cupidity stabbing me like a knife. ‘But are these not rather big weapons for a lady? I mean, you handle them beautifully but I should have thought something like a Colt Lightning or the Wells Fargo model perhaps …

She took the pistol, checked the position of the hammer and prestidigitated it back into the holster.

‘My husband insists on these big ones,’ she said, boredly. ‘It is something to do with the castration complex or the organ inferiority or some such nastiness. But you must be thirsty, my husband tells me you are often thirsty, I shall bring you some drink.’ With that she left me. I began to feel a bit castrated myself.

She was back in about two minutes, having changed into a minimal cotton frock and followed by a drinks-laden peon. Her manner, too, had changed and she sank down beside me with a friendly smile. Close beside me. I sort of inched away a bit. Cringed away would be better. She looked at me curiously for a moment, then giggled.

‘I see. My mother has been talking to you. Ever since she caught me when I was seventeen wearing nothing under my dress she has been convinced that I am a mare in heat. It is not true.’ She was making me a large, strong drink – the peon had been dismissed. ‘On the other hand,’ she continued, handing me the glass with a dazzling smile, ‘I have an unaccountable passion for men of your age and build.’ I simpered a little, making it clear that I recognized a joke and perhaps a mild tease.

‘Tee hee,’ I said. Then ‘Aren’t you having a drink?’

‘I never drink alcohol. I do not like to blunt my senses.’

‘Goodness,’ I babbled, ‘but how awful for you. Not drinking, I mean. I mean, imagine getting up in the morning knowing that you’re not going to feel any better all day.’

‘But I feel lovely all day, every day. Feel me.’ I spilled quite a lot of my drink.

‘No, really,’ she said, ‘feel.’

I gingerly prodded a golden, rounded forearm.

‘Not there, stupid: here!’ She flipped a button open and two of the most beautiful breasts in the world sprang out, quite bare, hard and richly nippled. In all civility I could not decline to grasp one, indeed, my hand made the decision for me. My castration complex had vanished like an evil dream. She pulled my head down to her.

Much as I enjoy kissing girls’ nipples, I must say I usually feel a bit sheepish about it, don’t you? I’m reminded of fat old men sucking juicily at their teat-like cigars. However, the extravagance of Johanna’s response to my first tentative grazing on her lovely pastures was such as to dispel all embarrassment from my mind, replacing it with fears for my own health. She reared up like a tortured cat and wrapped herself around me as though she were in the last extremities of drowning. Her slim, calloused fingers grasped me with delicious ferocity and I soon ascertained that her policy on underwear had not changed since she was seventeen.

‘Wait,’ I said urgently, ‘shouldn’t I take a shower first? I’m filthy.’

‘I know,’ she snarled, ‘I love it. You smell like a horse. You are a horse.’

Obediently, I broke into a canter, urged by her drumming heels. I was glad she had taken her spurs off.

Descriptions of middle-aged art dealers being ravished are neither instructive nor edifying, so I shall draw a row of ‘frissons’ like a shower curtain across the extraordinary scene which followed. Here they are:

I was shown to my room by the barefooted hussy in the drawstring blouse. She smiled at me blandly, pointing her lavish bosom like a pair of pistols.

‘I am at your service while you stay at the Rancho, señor,’ she said guilelessly. ‘My name is Josefina – that is, like Josephine.’

‘How apt,’ I murmured, ‘in the circumstances.’

She didn’t get it.

As the Countess had predicted, I was just in time for dinner. Changed and bathed, I sat down feeling more like the C. Mortdecai we know and love but I admit to having felt a little chary, a little coy about meeting the old lady’s eye. As it happened, she avoided catching mine; she was a dedicated food eater, it was a pleasure to sit in front of her.

‘Tell me,’ I said to Johanna as the second course appeared, ‘where is your husband?’

‘He is in his bedroom. Next to the little dressing room where I, ah, received you.’

I stared at her in panic – no sensate human being could have slept through the zoo-like racket of our coupling. Seeing my consternation she laughed merrily.

‘Please do not worry about it. He did not hear a thing, he has been dead several hours.’

I don’t really remember what we had for dinner. I’m sure it was delicious but I seemed to have difficulty swallowing and I kept on dropping knives, forks and things. ‘Quaking’ is the only word for what I was doing. All I remember is the old Countess opposite me, cramming the groceries into her frail body like one who provisions a yacht for a long voyage. ‘Cur quis non prandeat hoc est?’ seemed to be her attitude.

We had reached the port and walnuts stage before I recovered enough aplomb to venture another question.

‘Oh yes,’ Johanna replied indifferently, ‘it will have been his heart, I suppose. The doctor lives thirty miles away and is drunk; he will come in the morning. Why do you eat so little? You should take more exercise. I will lend you a mare in the morning, a gallop will do you good.’

I became scarlet and silent.

The old lady rang a silver bell which stood by her place and a whey-faced priest stole in and said a long Latin grace to which both the women listened with bent heads. Then the Countess rose and made her way with fragile dignity to the door, where she let out a fart of such frightening power and timbre that I feared she had done herself a mischief. The priest sat down at the end of the table and began gobbling nuts and guzzling wine as though his life depended on it. Johanna sat smiling dreamily into space, presumably envisaging a blissfully Krampf-free future. I certainly hoped she was not envisaging any bliss which would involve my participation in the near future: all I wanted was some Scotch and a big fat sleeping pill.

It was not to be. Johanna took me by the hand and led me off to see the corpse, much as one might be taken to see the ornamental waterfowl in an English house. Krampf lay naked and nasty and very dead indeed, displaying all the signs of a massive coronary occlusion, as the thriller writers say. (There are no outward signs of death by massive coronary occlusion.) On the carpet beside his bed lay a little silver box which I remembered; it always held his heart pills. Krampf had gone to join Hockbottle: dicky tickers, both of them. To name but a few.

His death solved a few problems and created a few more. There was something about the situation which I could not, at that stage of the evening, quite define, but I knew that the word ‘trouble’ figured in it somewhere. Feeling sure that Johanna would not mind, I drew back the sheet which covered him: there was no mark of violence on his lardy body. She came and stood on the other side of the bed and we looked down at him dispassionately. I had lost a rich customer; she had lost a rich husband; there was little quantitative difference between our sorrows and the qualitative difference was that she, presumably, stood to gain a lot of money and I stood to lose some. Had Krampf been alive he would have felt like Jesus Christ between the two thieves, and indeed, death had lent him a certain spirituality, a certain waxy saintliness.

‘He was a dirty ape,’ she said at last. ‘Also base and greedy.’

‘I am all those things,’ I answered quietly, ‘yet I do not think I am like Krampf was.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was mean in a shabby, tight-fisted way. I do not think you are mean like that, or at all. Why should rich men be mean?’

‘I think it is because they would like to stay rich.’

She thought about that and didn’t like it.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘His greed was not of that sort. It was other people’s lives he was greedy for: he collected his fellow men like postage stamps. He did not really want the stolen picture which you have in the cover of the Rolls Royce: it was you he was buying. You would never have got free from him after this deal. You would have been kissing his pimply behind for the rest of your life.’

This upset me very much. First, even Krampf could not have known – should not have known – just where the Goya was supposed to be hidden; second, here was yet another person apparently manipulating me instead of vice versa; third, this was a woman, for God’s sake, deep into the conspiracy and bubbling over with dangerous facts. Krampf had always been rash but he knew the basic rules of villainy. How on earth had he sunk to the point of telling things to a woman?

The whole complexion of Krampf’s death changed; before, it had been an extreme awkwardness, now it was a peril. With all this dangerous knowledge surging about so freely there were dozens of motives for killing him when previously there had only been one: Martland’s.

Moreover, I had decided only that morning not to carry out my part of the contract I had made with Martland for the terminating of Krampf. I have no patience with the absurd respect in which human life is held these days – indeed, our chief trouble is that there is far too much human life around – but as I grow older I find myself less and less keen on actually topping people myself. Particularly when they happen to be my best customers. Nevertheless, I should probably have kept faith with Martland as per contract had it not occurred to me that morning that I was already on the butcher’s bill myself and that once I had killed Krampf I would be there redoubled, in spades, for a variety of reasons which you can surely work out for yourself.

‘When did he go mad, child?’ I asked gently.

‘In the womb, I think. Badly, when he started to make plots with a man called Gloag.’

I winced.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that figures.’

Despite appearances I was now certain that Krampf had been murdered: there were far too many motives. There are also far too many ways of simulating death by heart disease – and even more of inducing it in someone already prone to it.

I was piggy-in-the-middle and it felt horrid. Only Martland’s word as a prefect stood between me and the ultimate in whackings from that fell school sergeant Death. Martland’s word was as good as his bond, but his bond was mere Monopoly money. I pulled myself together.

‘Well, Johanna,’ I said brightly, ‘I must be off to bed.’

‘Yes,’ she said, taking me firmly by the hand, ‘we must.’

‘Look, my dear, I’m really awfully tired, you know. And I’m not a young man any more …’

‘Ah, but I have a way of curing both those things – come and see.’

I’m not really weak, you know, just bad and easily led. I shambled after her, my manhood cringing. The night was intolerably hot.

Her room greeted us with steamy heat like a buffet in the face – I panicked as she drew me in and bolted the door.

‘The windows are sealed,’ she explained, ‘the drapes are closed, the central heating turned up high. Look, I am sweating already!’

I looked. She was.

‘This is the best way of all to do it,’ she went on, peeling off my drenched shirt, ‘and you will find yourself young and vigorous, I promise you, it never fails, we shall be like animals in a tropical swamp.

I tried a tentative bellow of lust but without much conviction. She was anointing me copiously from a bottle of baby oil, handing me the bottle, stepping out of the last of her clothes and offering the astonishing landscape of her steaming body to the oil. I oiled. From some undreamed-of reservoir my body summoned up a gravity tank of incalescent libido.

‘There, you see?’ she said, gaily, pointing at me, and led me to one of those terrifying water-filled plastic beds – eclipsing me with her deliquescent body, coaxing succulent sounds from the contiguity of our bellies, shaming forth a long dead, steel hard, adolescent Mortdecai demented with furtive lust: Mortdecai Minor, the likeliest candidate for wanker’s doom.

‘Tonight, because you are tired, I am no longer the mare. You are the lazy circus horse and I shall school you in the haute école. Lie back, you will like this very much, I promise.’

I liked it.